


Ship of the Line: An Unquenchable Fire

by DreamSmithAJK



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Darkfic, Gen, Ship of the Line, YAHF, crossover fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-09-06
Packaged: 2018-04-16 20:33:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 47,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4639230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamSmithAJK/pseuds/DreamSmithAJK
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She may be Sith, but she's still pretty.<br/>Also, she has a Super StarDestroyer, and she isn't afraid to use it.</p><p>A YAHF story, with the universes of Buffy and SG:1 combined, with aspects of Star Wars showing up in-universe.<br/>(Yes, it sounds messy, but believe me, it all comes together much more cleanly than one might assume. Trust me.)</p><p>What happens when Buffy's identity is overwritten by that of the most iconic villain in science fiction?<br/>What happens when that person has access to one of the most powerful war machines in any universe?<br/>What happens if Earth's military jumps to exactly the wrong conclusion, and does exactly the wrong thing?</p><p>This is dark, and there is character death early on, but the point of this isn't to be sadistic. Instead, this is a frank look at what might go wrong in a very odd first-contact situation, what the fallout of that would be, and how things might eventually lead to a better and brighter place.</p><p>You might love it, you might hate it, but at least give it a try.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Emergence

**Author's Note:**

> All characters and situations are the property of their respective owners.  
> Buffy, Star Wars, and Stargate are not mine; I claim only those characters, situations and events that are my own.

Chaos Event minus 11 Days

"Seriously?" Xander knew he looked like a fool, staring at her that way, eyes wide and mouth gaping, it was just that he couldn't help himself. "I mean, it would be great; greater than great, even, but... _seriously_?"

Buffy smiled impishly back at him, clearly amused by his reaction.

"Yes, seriously."

"For Halloween, you will not only dress up in a full costume, but you're going to let me pick the character? _And the outfit_?" Xander was still having trouble believing this wasn't all a dream; especially since he'd _had_ this exact scenario play out in his dreams. Frequently. 

"Yep." Something in his face must have awoken some small concern, because she blinked, regarded him narrowly for a few seconds, and then nodded warily. "It's the least I could do, since you did save my life and everything, when the Master killed me." Her smile turned rueful. "Plus there's that whole thing from a few weeks ago, when you forgave me after I tried to drive you crazy with that sexy dance at the Bronze."

He felt himself flushing at the memory of that dance.

"Oh, don't sell yourself short, Buff. You _did_ drive me crazy with that sexy dance. I'll get over it eventually, though." He gave her a mock-serious glare that was rather more serious than mock. "It'll take years, mind you, possibly decades, but I'll get over it."

Buffy made a sympathetic noise, her lips pursed in a devastatingly attractive moue that sent a stabbing sensation through that part of him that would always and forever be desperately, hopelessly in love with Buffy Summers.

"Well, all right then," She said, shaking her hair back and giving him a expectant look. "Since I acted so badly, and played with your manly-yet-fragile emotions, this is your chance to play with _me_." Buffy paused, he raised his eyebrows at her inquiringly, and she shook her head. "Let me rephrase that: this is your chance to play _dress up_ with me, as in, 'dress up my body', not any other sort of playing. With my, um... body."

Xander was seventeen, and had whole mental libraries of fantasies regarding Buffy's body, entirely separate from his pure and undying love for Buffy herself. With a Herculean effort he managed to push that aside and concentrate on the opportunity he'd been given.

"Got it. And don't worry, I already know exactly what I'm going to do with you."

Her eyes widened.

"You do?"

Xander nodded slowly.

"Oh yes, my pretty. Ohhhh yesssss...."

* * * * *   


Chaos Event minus 74 Hours

"--So Willow and I looked all through Giles' office, only we couldn't find anything in the Watcher's Diaries about human Angel _anywhere_ \--" Buffy was saying from inside the tiny bathroom, her voice strained as she struggled with something. "Which reallyreally bugs me, 'cause I want to know more about him, you know? Only he's--my _God_ this is tight, Xander--only he's not exactly 'share guy' at the best of times, and whenever I ask him about his life before he got all vampy he totally goes into maximum-strength brood mode...."

"I think Giles must have started keeping some of his books at his apartment," Willow added, without looking up from what she was working on at her desk. Like the rest of her bedroom, it was strewn with bits and pieces of costume and costume-making materials. "It's almost like he's afraid we'll go snooping around or something, which is sort of insulting."

"It's totally insulting," Buffy agreed from behind the door, followed by a bump, a thud, and a grunt, in that order. "Xander, I _swear_ I'm going to get you back for doing this to me. Bad enough that I have to dress up as this evil person, but changing the outfit around like this is just--"

"If I wanted to see the original version, I'd watch the movies again," Xander told the door, glancing over from where he sat on Willow's bed. "Coming up with a new take on things is half the fun of doing this." Lowering his voice to a faint murmur, he continued. "And getting to see you wearing it is the other half of the fun. Okay, more like ninety percent of the fun...."

" _I heard that_!" Buffy called. "Super hearing, remember?" A series of squeaks and creaks followed, and he and Willow shared a look, and a grin before going back to their respective tasks. "...And I dare anyone who isn't super strong to try and get this thing on." More squeaks, a grunt or two, and at least one heartfelt sigh. "Couldn't you have gotten it just one size bigger, so it would fit me?"

Ignoring the fact that she couldn't see him, Xander shook his head.

"If it's that hard to get on then it _does_ fit you. It's supposed to be sexy, not comfortable." He finished tracing the outline of the cardboard pattern onto the sheet of springy black plastic, set the marker aside, picked up the shears, and carefully started cutting. "Besides, that was the only one they had in the costume shop."

"Oh." The bathroom door swung open, and she stepped into view. "Okay then, if tight is what you were looking for then 'mission accomplished', I guess."

This statement was followed by several long seconds of complete silence and utter stillness, as Buffy stood there, Xander stared in stunned admiration... and so did Willow, though his attention was too fixed for that to really register.

Buffy looked from one to the other (and frowned in faint puzzlement at Willow) before lowering her eyes in embarrassment.

"I look ridiculous."

"Not even a little," Xander told her, in absolute seriousness. Willow, eyes wide, managed only a tiny squeak, and a vigorous nod of agreement.

The Slayer was all in skintight black, a sleek, gleaming bodysuit that left her looking like she'd been coated in liquid obsidian. From the base of her throat to the tips of her fingers and toes, it covered her completely... while simultaneously showing off every gorgeous inch of her form. The one concession he'd made had been to allow her to add a skirt; for all her confidence and courage, Buffy suffered from the all-too-common belief that her butt was either oversized, underfirm, or some combination of the two. From what Xander had seen of the backside in question (and he had studied the matter extensively, though covertly) she had absolutely no need for concern on either count. Nevertheless, he had allowed her the skirt, and he had to admit that it looked good. It was one of the 'high/low' sort; hitting her legs high on the thigh in front but falling lower and lower from there so that in back it actually trailed on the floor for two or three feet behind her. The black, satiny material complimented the bodysuit perfectly, and made a nice callback to the dramatic, billowing cape of the original character.

Xander got up and stepped closer, to get a better look. Up close, the material of the suit had a subtle shimmer about it, creating a sense of depth to the shine that was lacking in the other latex clothing he'd seen. Those pieces, though undeniably sexy, also tended to look cheap, or even just tacky. The suit Buffy was wearing made her look like she was wearing a flawless black mirror. Realizing he was staring (like Willow was still staring, openmouthed, from her chair) he met her eyes and grinned.

"You look amazing. Not one single person will laugh at you, believe me."

Finally recovering her voice, Willow agreed.

"Cordelia will go in _sane_ when she sees you. Or, when she sees all the boys seeing you, and ignoring her, I mean." She frowned a little, looked down to where her hands were fiddling awkwardly with the soldering tool she was holding, and muttered something that that Xander didn't quite catch, something about 'boys, only the boys, definitely just boys', which of course made no sense whatsoever. Buffy, seemingly reassured by their words, looked thoughtful.

"Even Angel? I've been trying to get him to pay attention to me, instead of Cordy, only...." She ran a hand up and down her opposite arm, considering the gleaming material that encased her. "You don't think this is too much of... too much?"

Xander sighed. The vampire was, honestly, his least favorite topic of conversation, but if it made her feel better....

"Absolutely. Nobody with a pulse is going to be able to--" Seeing her look he stopped short, then tried again. "Strike that. I mean, nobody who is now, or has at any time been alive, will be able to look away. That is, provided they were, you know, attracted to women at the time of their aliveness." He couldn't help smirking a bit, and continuing along that line. "Which of _course_ Angel is--er, I mean, was. Attracted to women, that is. Despite all the rumors and speculation to the contrary. I mean, what do you think Giles doesn't want you to see in those Watcher's diaries--"

A playful, mock-angry punch from a Slayer could bruise to the bone, so he'd finally had to ask her to stop doing it. Now she simply reached for him, purposely slowing the move to give him time to dance back out of reach, smiling goofily. She scowled at him, though her eyes twinkled.

"If I wasn't wearing these shoes, I'd chase you down and pummel you badly," She grumbled. He glanced down at the footwear in question and shrugged. 

"Hey, those were already in _your_ closet; it's not my fault they work so well with the outfit. Your character is tall: he looms. You need all the height you can get."

The shoes were shiny black, of course, of the style that some people uncharitably called 'stripper heels'. These were actually fairly tame examples, however, with the platform beneath the toes about two inches high, though the heels themselves were more than three times that. Buffy peered down at them, and flushed slightly as she looked back up.

"Hate to break this to you, Xand, but even with these I don't loom."

Sure enough, even though he was only middling tall, she still had to look up to meet his eyes.

"Eh, close enough. And they do give you a plus two bonus on the 'induce drooling in all onlookers' ability that all of you hot girls have, which you absolutely knew when you bought them, you little minx."

Her grin was utterly unrepentant.

"What can I say, sometimes you have to use your powers for evil. Besides, my father took me shopping so many times over the summer that I ran out of tasteful things to buy. So I had no choice; I _had_ to get these. Even though they are, um, horribly impractical, clearly indicative of the inequality of the sexes, and demeaning to all women everywhere." She nodded slowly, her voice solemn. "And I, as a modern, strong and independent woman would never, ever wear them, unless forced to do so by an awful and sexist male who is only fantasizing about females who can't run fast enough to get away from him."

Xander snorted.

"Right. Because girls never dress up just because they like looking great. Also, a tuxedo is _not_ the most comfortable thing a guy can wear, either, yet we still have to wear them when you female-types make us. And lastly, I don't for one second believe you're helpless just because you're wearing hyper-girly shoes; you could probably do a gymnastics routine, flip a car over by kicking it, and set an Olympic record in the 400 meters right this minute, all without breaking a sweat."

Buffy could only shrug reluctantly at the truth of this.

"Still, I'd hate to fight even one above-average vampire in all this, much less Spike and his whole gang. If Giles wasn't absolutely sure that all the nasties take the night off--"

"He _is_ sure," Xander told her, moving to the bed to retrieve what he'd been working on earlier. "So relax, enjoy yourself, and most importantly, hold still." 

He draped the still-incomplete arrangement over her head and settled it over her shoulders. There were nine interlocking pieces of cut-up plastic that made up each shoulder, joined together from beneath with a fairly cunning arrangement of wire and shoelaces. Surveying the result of his work, Xander nodded happily.

"Not bad if I do say so myself."

"Annnnnd you just did," Buffy helpfully informed him, smirking.

"Yeah, well, a little sanding, a few coats of paint, and you'll have a set of 'armored' shoulder pauldrons there that will look incredibly badass." He took a step back to get an overall impression, and nodded again. The modest bulk of the shoulder pieces went a long way towards changing Buffy from a beautiful girl in skintight black to a threatening figure in black who only happened to also be a beautiful girl. It was a matter of emphasis, and there were still a few things to be added that would further strengthen the effect.

"I've got the blinkies working," Willow chimed in. "Wanna see?"

They both went over to look, and Xander couldn't help notice that despite her protestations, Buffy's Slayer dexterity made walking in the super-high heels look smoothly graceful.

"Okay, so you said you didn't want that control box thingie in the middle of your chest, which I understand because, you know, guys can put things there, but girls already _have_ something in the middle of our chests, right?" Willow was almost painfully earnest and eager to please; even moreso than Xander she was caught up in the geeky joy of making the costumes, though in her case there was the added technical challenge of the electrical bits. "So what I did instead was put all of the little controls and lights on everything else instead." 

Buffy smiled down at her (Xander saw her do a double-take, then bounce lightly on her toes in silent delight as she realized that she was now tall enough to loom over Willow quite satisfactorily), and gave her best friend a one-armed hug.

"They're very blinky, Wil," she told the girl, looking approvingly at the items spread out on the work surface.

"Aren't they? See, here's your bracelets, and these go on your upper arms, and these are for the belt... only I'm still waiting for Xander to finish that part, but here's the boards and the batteries for them." She pushed little buttons on various things and smiled proudly as the tiny glowing lights obligingly turned on, off, or shifted the pattern and speed of their blinking. Even Xander was impressed, and he'd been watching Willow tinker with similar things since they were small children.

"Nice work," he told her in all sincerity. "I was afraid it would be too chunky, especially the wrist pieces, but these are--"

"It's because I used watch batteries," She told him excitedly, pointing. "See, this is where they go in." She looked up at Buffy. "Be careful not to turn them on till we're actually at the party, 'cause I've got them loaded pretty heavily with this many LED's, so they'll probably only last a couple of hours."

"Got it," Buffy told her. She tilted her head slightly to the side and reached out to poke one of the objects with a finger. "What's this?"

Xander picked it up and showed it to her.

"A gorget." At her blank look he tried again. "A choker, basically, only made out of armor. In this case, the same 'let's pretend it's armor' that we're using for your shoulders and for Willow's whole suit."

Buffy reached out to take it from him, and considered it.

"Okay, this is fine, but there's not going to be a helmet, right? I do not want to have to wear that huge helmet and mask thing."

He shook his head, and she gave a very visible, very audible sigh of relief, to which he replied in a hyper-serious, Giles-like tone.

"Buff, do you honestly think I'm going to go to all this trouble, get you all dressed up, and go with you to that party at the Bronze without making sure everyone there sees how gorgeous you are? And, obviously, how awesome I am, by association?" She smiled brilliantly at that, exceedingly pleased. A moment later, however, her expression darkened, and she turned slightly, nudging him sharply in the side with her elbow, nodding at Willow. The other girl, having witnessed the previous exchange, was staring fixedly down at the blinking devices on the desk. "Ow! _Both_ of you are. I meant to say, 'how gorgeous _both_ of you are." Willow looked up in surprise, and gave them both a look that basically said 'Who, _me_?'.

Buffy made an affectionate, exasperated sound and tugged lightly at the girl's red hair.

"Yes, Wil, you're gorgeous... or you would be, if you'd only try a little." She stopped there, eyes narrowing as she considered her friend. "In fact... let's run with that."

"Huh?" Sometimes, mega-genius or no, it took Willow a few seconds to process the unexpected. However, when Buffy strode over to a carefully organized assortment of shiny white 'armor' and gathered it up in her arms, she reacted very quickly indeed. 

"Hey! Buffy, be _careful_ , I've been working on that for days--Ack!"

Thrusting the outfit into Xander's arms, Buffy smiled brightly.

"Congratulations, Xander; you are now a... whatever this is. Enjoy."

He looked down at the outfit, then over at Willow, who looked to be equal parts stunned and confused.

"It's an Advanced Stormtrooper," She said, more or less to both of them, though of course he'd already known. "Which, okay yeah, I sort of made up, but since I was doing all the buttons and blinkies for yours, it was easy enough to do some for my outfit too...."

Buffy was shaking her head firmly. The white outfit _had_ come equipped with a full, face-covering helmet, and she held Willow's gaze as she effortlessly crushed it to bits in her tiny, delicate hands.

"No more hiding. If I have to wear this, then you have to dress up in something sexy too." Her smile was ever-so-slightly evil as she eyed the girl. "You know, basically everybody on Earth has seen these movies, even me. And I think I know exactly what outfit we'll use to unleash your inner hottie."

Justifiably worried, Willow shot Xander a look. Shifting the jumble of armor in his arms, all he could do was shake his head sadly.

"Sorry, Wil. Our Dark Overlord has spoken, and we must obey."

Besides, he had a pretty shrewd notion of which outfit Buffy had in mind, and it simply wasn't in him to interfere with anything that might get Willow into _that_. Assuming all went well, he would be walking into the Bronze with a beautiful girl on each arm. That fact alone would keep him supplied with Man-cred for the rest of his high school career. The fact that Willow and Buffy would both be decked out in utterly sexy sci-fi costumes? Well, that wouldn't just count for cred among his geekier acquaintances--it would very likely result in them hailing him as their _God._

  
* * * * *   


Halloween Night

Chaos Event minus 81 minutes

"Are you _sure_ you're okay?" He asked for the third time. "We still have time to get you out of that if you're having trouble breathing--"

"It's _fine_ , Xander," She told him, glancing over from where she sat in front of her dresser. Her perfect posture and whispery, slightly breathless voice were both the product of the corset she wore over her bodysuit; a beautiful thing of soft black leather that had come, like so many other bits of their outfits, from Ethan's costume shop. It had taken Xander and Willow, working together and using every bit of strength they had, a full twenty minutes to lace Buffy into it. His hands were still aching a little even now from gripping the cords, and he felt a little guilty at how much of a good sport the Slayer was being about the whole thing, when she could end the entire affair with a single word.

"If you're sure," he told her back, his discomfort coloring his voice. "We've gotten sort of carried away with all of this, and I know you weren't expecting things to get this crazy when you said yes to--"

"Xander." She turned around in her chair to face him, her movements a little tentative as she worked out how to deal with the various ways in which her outfit constricted her. "Listen to me," She said, her clear, green gaze trapping his own. "I know everyone forgets it sometimes, but I'm not _just_ the Slayer, you know? I'm a girl. More than that, I'm a girly-girl type girl, from way back." She smiled wistfully, the focus of her eyes slipping for a moment as she regarded some fond memory. "If you'd known me before any of this started... God, I made _Cordelia_ look serious and responsible...." Her eyes came back to him. "What I'm saying is, I like dressing up. I _love_ getting crazy with clothes and shoes and makeup. I know, I've never done anything like this costume thing, exactly, but--" She smiled again, and this time it wasn't wistful, it was peaceful, perfect and content, and it somehow warmed his soul and broke his heart, all in the same instant. "You and Willow are my friends, and I love you both, and I can't imagine anything else I'd rather be doing tonight than spending it with you guys. We've had tons of horrible things happen to us, and we've done what we had to do to survive all of that, but it's time for a break. If this is the one night when we can be sure none of the bad guys will cause trouble, then I say we deserve a chance to play."

Xander nodded, looked away so that she wouldn't see the tear trying to escape from his eye, and cleared his throat.

"All... alrighty then," he said, no doubt dazzling her with his amazing wit. "Um... so, the children-supervising thing Snyder has us doing... how long do you think that'll take?" In his peripheral vision he saw her turn back to the mirror and put one last pin in her hair before reaching for her makeup.

"Not very long, I think. Willow has the schedule, but I doubt they want us to keep them out very late. We'll still have plenty of time to get to the Bronze."

He nodded, and decided it was time to get serious about getting into his own costume. His initial idea had been simple; dark blue pants, white dress shirt, and a black vest, with a gunslinger's belt and a plastic laser pistol from the collection he had in his basement. It was iconic, it fit with Buffy's outfit, and it was a character he held in very high regard. Now, thanks to Buffy's decision to give him Willow's nearly-complete armor, he'd had only three days to come up with a new concept. Luckily, he had certain resources he could draw on for that.

He was also aware that Buffy, leaning close to her mirror and skillfully applying layer after layer of makeup, was sneaking occasional peeks at him as he geared up.

"So... This _isn't_ that Stormtrooper thing Willow was thinking of when she was making that outfit? Or that Booba Feet guy from the third movie?"

His 'armor' was much easier to put on than Buffy's; he slid the leg sections on one at a time, hooked them onto the belt, then attached the individual pieces that fit together to cover his groin and backside. The black sweatpants and tee shirt he wore underneath everything would prevent any pasty-skinned peek-a-boo from between the white plastic shapes.

"Naw," he answered her a few moments later, when he was sure the arrangement would allow him to walk without too much difficulty. "Willow is all about staying out of the spotlight. Me? I'd rather be somebody more important than just another piece of cannon fodder, y'know? And Boba Fett was cool, and I thought about going there, but to be honest, it took me hours to adjust this up from Willow-size to me-size, and I didn't have enough time to build that backpack rocket of his, or do the repainting."

Buffy nodded in understanding, turning her head slightly from one side to the other and eying her reflection critically. From what he could see, she looked much too pale and unnatural, but she seemed pleased, and moved on to applying even more liner around her eyes.

"Speaking of Willow, I'm feeling kind of bad about bullying her like this," she said, the ultra-tight corset still limiting her breath to shallow sips and her voice to little more than a whisper. "She worked really hard on that costume--and on mine--and then I go and push her into dressing in that... well, in _that_."

Xander was in the midst of fasting the front and back halves of his torso armor in place with the hidden snaps along each side.

"Hey, sometimes you gotta be firm with people. You're one hundred percent right about her needing to come out of her shell. If she doesn't, then in fifty years we're going to have an insanely rich Willow, living in a penthouse somewhere with all the windows painted over, wearing tissue boxes for shoes and ranting about how everybody on Earth has alien implants in their skulls."

"I guess. Speaking of Willow...." Buffy turned her head and called towards the open door to the hallway, straining mightily to manage any sort of volume or projection. "Hey, Wil! Are you doing all right in there? We need to leave soon!"

From down the hall, the other girl's voice came back, faintly.

"No! I mean, yes, basically, except for...." There was an unhappy pause, then: "Okay, yes, almost ready!"

Xander smiled to himself as he pulled on the arm sections of his armor. Since Buffy's mother was out of town the three of them had decided to use her house as their base of operations for the night, largely because Willow couldn't bear the thought of her own parents seeing her in the costume she'd be wearing.

"Xander? Who _is_ this person you're dressing up as, exactly?"

He pushed the button to activate the lights on his left arm display, admired the gleaming blue and red results, and switched them back off.

"He's in the movies, you probably just didn't notice him; starship captain, one of the guys with the evil British accents." He tapped another button, frowned, whacked the forearm with his palm and then nodded as more lights flickered to life. "See, back in the day, me, Willow and Jesse all played the RPG based on this. You know, the pencil and paper game, like Dungeons and Dragons? Well, one of Jesse's characters was this sort of guy, a ship captain, only Jesse got tired of being gunned down by every pirate and smuggler who boarded the ship. So he came up with something a lot like this: Bridge Officer Armor, like the stuff the grunts all wear, only with lots of communications gear, because a ship's captain would need that to do his job."

Buffy made a sound of agreement instead of speaking, since she was busy applying something very pale to her lips with a tiny brush. It was impressive, how deftly she managed that, given that her hands and fingers were encased in gleaming black latex.

"Anyway, because it was Jesse, that Officer's armor also came with a built-in blaster, dart thrower, anti-concussion fields (because seriously, _every_ space movie shows people getting thrown around the bridge of their ship, and you gotta be ready for that), comm links to the ship's computer, twenty-four hours of life support, low-power thrusters for moving around in weightlessness...."

Her reflected gaze met his, and he saw the sympathy there as he trailed off.

"I wish he could be here, Xander. I would have liked for him to get to wear that tonight."

He cleared his throat, and concentrated on pulling on his gloves.

"He would have loved it. He got obsessed over this even more than the rest of us." He smiled faintly, even through the sadness, at one memory in particular. "The ship my character commands is pretty amazing; it's got a write-up in two or three different rulebooks, right? Well, we read those, and neither of us agreed with what they'd listed for it. So we spent a whole weekend writing up everything we could think of; the weapons, the defenses, sublight and hyperdrive stats, what kind of droids were on board, what they could do and how many there were. We pretended we were going to do that planetary assault they did in the second movie, and then wrote out what kind of vehicles and support ships you'd use if you _weren't_ a total idiot."

Buffy, finally done with her cosmetics work, settled a wig over her own short, pinned-down hair, and very carefully didn't say anything, for which he was grateful. This was a girl who could, if she so wished, be every bit as popular and admired as Cordelia. She could be one of those beautiful, vapid girls who treated people like he and Willow like peasants. That she chose not to do so was amazing to him.

"I know," he said. "That's the kind of thing only geeks with no lives would do."

"Wrong," she answered with surprising fierceness, in a sort of whispery growl. "That's the kind of thing _friends_ do, same as all of this." She used a small, oddly-shaped comb to make a few adjustments to her faux hair, then made a few more. "Bear in mind, I still might kill you before the night is over, for putting me through all of this." With that, she set down the comb, rose smoothly and carefully to her feet, turned to face him, and spread her arms to either side.

"All done. How do I look?"

He didn't answer immediately; one didn't come face-to-face with a goddess, or an artist's masterpiece, and then blurt out the first thing that sprang to mind.

The bodysuit and trailing skirt, the completed shoulder pieces, belt, bracelets and armbands; those he'd seen already in various stages over the last week or so. The rest of it had been up to Buffy to manage, and she'd done very well with it indeed.

With the addition of the wig, her hair was now a sleek mass of white-blonde platinum, falling dead-straight to the small of her back. The ends of her long bangs were tinted a sooty black, as was a border down and around to either side that served to frame and emphasize her face. All those skillfully applied cosmetics had transformed her sun-kissed California attractiveness into a thing of icy perfection; her skin pale as snow, her features as stark and cold as sunlight reflecting off a glacier. 

"Wow. I... _wow_."

He saw her silvery-white lips quirk slightly before she caught herself and schooled her expression into an emotionless mask. Turning slightly to one side, she struck an imperious pose, like a conqueror surveying a field of fallen enemies. The monochrome beauty of her, all in shimmering silver and gleaming ebony, held him there, staring and spellbound for what seemed like minutes. Eventually, when he made no further comment, she quirked one pale, perfect brow.

"Well?"

"Ahhh--"

He couldn't tell her what he was really thinking--that she looked like a duelist's rapier; slender, delicate, and intensely lethal. He most _definitely_ couldn't tell her that, at least in that moment, he would happily murder her beloved Angel right in front of her if there was even the tiniest chance she would someday forgive him, and come to love him as he loved her. What he _could_ do was what he always did: act the clown, play things off with a joke, a laugh, and a smile.

"I am in awe," he told her, which was only the truth. "And I hereby renounce spandex. From this day forward, my loyalty shall be to clothing made of latex, and latex only."

Buffy grinned, and giggled, which ruined the illusion of cold arrogance she'd been projecting a moment earlier.

"I know I'm supposed to be all scarred and nasty underneath the helmet, but honestly, does anyone really believe that these people have spaceships, and these amazing robots, and _not_ plastic surgery?"

Given the vision before him, Xander had no intention of arguing.

"I hear you. Besides, if I can rewrite my guy, it's only fair for you to tweak yours a little too."

"That's good, 'cause I'm not going to do that weird breathing thing, either."

That pained him a little bit, just from a fan boy point of view, but he spread his hands in acceptance.

"No problem. We'll just say that your suit feeds some kind of medication or liquid into your veins that helps oxygenate your blood or something. Besides, you're already doing a slightly weird breathing thing, without even trying, so it's all good."

She started to answer him, stopped short, and gave an exasperated sigh instead.

"Willow...."

Xander followed her gaze to the door, where a figure stood, draped in a white sheet. The black eyeholes stared back at them in mournful contrast to the upbeat 'BOO!' emblazoned upon the ghost's chest. He frowned in exaggerated confusion.

"Kudos to you, Wil; this is _not_ the costume I was expecting. Bonus points for the successful fakeout." Buffy stalked past him, her skirt trailing along the floor behind her, and reached out to grab the sheet.

"Buffy-- _don't_!" Willow squeaked, then it was too late, as the covering was yanked away in an instant, leaving her exposed.

Leaving lots and _lots_ of her exposed, Xander thought to himself.

The details of the costume was burned indelibly into the visual cortexes of roughly two and a half billion men: the metallic gold and red of the bikini top, the slinky red cloth of the separated skirt panels, which showed the sides of her legs _all_ the way up. Princess Leia's slave girl outfit was legendary, and Xander had privately wondered if his mousy friend would be able to carry it off. Looking at her now, however, any doubts were quickly cast aside. Because, even though the sight of Buffy in _her_ outfit had effectively immunized him from ever again feeling lust for any other woman, there was no denying that Willow absolutely did it justice. 

"Ack! Give that back, I _can't_ \--" The red-haired girl paused as the breathtaking wintery goddess before her fully registered. "Buffy, you look amazing."

The Slayer tossed the sheet aside and leveled the full force of those clear green eyes at her friend. 

"And so do you, Willow. You're a dish. _Really_."

Xander watched her fidget and fumble, making aborted motions to try and cover herself only to pull back and fidget some more.

"I--are you sure?" Her hands went to her long red braid, tugging at it anxiously as she looked longingly to where her ghost costume had landed. "I do better with being laughed at when I'm covered up, so if people are going to do it anyway, I'd really rather have my sheet back."

Xander threw his own moral support in alongside Buffy's, putting his gloved hand beneath Willow's chin and turning her head slightly so that her eyes met his.

"You know that fake laugh that the cheerleaders do, when they're jealous of someone and trying to pretend they aren't? _That_ is the only kind of laughing anyone will be doing. You look fantastic, Wil. And if you're brave enough to leave that sheet off, you're going to get all the proof you need when the guys start lining up just hoping for a chance to talk to you."

Willow stared back at him, obviously torn, but finally she took a deep breath, held it, then let it out in a rush.

"O-okay, I will... be brave, then, I suppose, and... and face the peril. Or... peers. I will face the perilous peers."

"Thanks to the power of peer-pressure potently applied," Xander murmured, only barely managing to duck out of the way when Buffy made as if to punch him. "Annnnnd on that note, I think we should get ourselves over the school, so we can be issued our tiny groups of tiny people, right?"

The two girls nodded and accompanied him into the hall and down the stairs into the Summers' living room, Buffy doing so with carefully precise grace because of her towering heels, and directing a brief level three glare at their relatively practical and comfortable footwear.

"Do you think the kids are going to be okay with all of this?" she asked, gesturing to herself and Willow.

Xander smiled at her reassuringly.

"Well, since none of them will have hit puberty yet, they won't be affected by either of your powers, so I think it'll be fine."

Willow was tugging at her braid again.

"I hope you're right. If Snyder calls my mother, I'll be in so much trouble--"

"It'll be fine," he told her.

They exited the house, and lit by the last rays of the setting sun, they headed down the sidewalk, Buffy on one side of him and Willow on the other.

"You had better be right about that," the Slayer said, her soft voice teasing. "Technically, I'm your boss you know, even if you are the captain of some ginormous ship. If you screw up, I might do something very nasty to you." She tapped him lightly in the center of his chest with one shiny/shimmery, black-clad finger for emphasis, her lips quirking up at the corners.

Xander widened his eyes to show the appropriate level of terror, and made an audible gulping sound.

"I promise I'll try very hard not to disappoint you in any way, my Lady."

She gave him an amused, sidelong look.

"You'd better not."

"I won't."

  
* * * * *   


Chaos Event plus 6 Minutes

"You have disappointed me, Captain. _Severely_."

Her soft, breathy voice caressed his ears like the blade of a knife made from purest silver, even as the life was slowly crushed from his body.

"Mm-My--My Lady!" Piett gasped, straining to force the words from a chest that was being squeezed ever-tighter by an inexorable, invisible _something_. "It isn't... isn't my f-fault!" His armor, though it was constructed from immensely tough and resilient alloys, did nothing to protect him from this. The technology it contained, weapons and defenses alike, were unlikely to save him either. "N-not m-my _fault_!"

The power that held him transfixed, spread-eagled and hovering a full meter above the deck, yanked him around to face her.

"Oh, isn't it?" She asked, that unsettling voice seething with quiet rage. 

Even through his pain and terror, her beauty struck him again, as it had every time he had laid eyes upon her. Almost painfully young, yet radiating power and danger, the dark Lady of the Sith leaned close and whispered.

"Where is my crew?"

She gestured at the vastness of the ship's bridge all around them; a vastness that remained shockingly, impossibly bereft of the hundreds of personnel who should have manned it's stations. Whatever held him relaxed it's grip slightly, and he drew in a long, shuddering breath before answering.

"I do not know, my Lady."

Her eyes, those cold, bottomless eyes, never left his own, even as she half-turned and paced three slow steps to the side.

"Where is my fleet?"

Piett licked his lips nervously, his eyes flicking to the floor-to-ceiling viewports along the bridge's forward arc. The stars were there, and a planet below them, but of the _Executor_ 's battlegroup there was no sign. He could try begging for the chance to run yet another sensor scan, but the three previous attempts had all provided identical negative results.

"I--I do not know, my Lady."

She turned and paced back past him, her gaze still holding his own.

"Where have you brought us, Captain? What world is that below us? Not Hoth, obviously, despite my orders."

"There mus--must have b-been some Hyperspace a-anomaly--"

She faced him fully once more, silvery lips moving into a faint, mocking pout.

"Captain...." She sounded almost disappointed that he would even attempt such a childish excuse.

"I do n-not know, my Lady," he admitted, hoping against hope that she would show him mercy. She was by far the youngest of the Sith Lords, and her habit of acting on impulse and emotion instead of reason made it difficult to predict what she would do in any given situation. "My Lady, if you will only give me a chance to correct my mistake--"

The power gripping him tightened suddenly, then, terrifyingly, continued to tighten. The pale girl shook her head, that flawless face utterly without compassion or pity.

"I think... no." 

Piett gasped, struggled to twist free, struggled to move at all, and failed.

"Your cowardice disgusts me," she said, observing his struggles as one might observe an insect caught in a web. "Perhaps, if you managed to fight back in any meaningful way, I might change my mind...."

He activated the thrusters in his armor; even without his helmet in place, the suit would respond to the short-range signals from his cranial comm implant. There was a whine, and he shifted in place a few centimeters in one direction, then another, but that was all. The thrusters was never meant to sustain actual flight in a gravity field, and the girl's grip was far too strong for them to overcome.

"Trying to run is not the same thing as fighting, Captain." 

His ribs creaked as he triggered the anti-concussion field, which surrounded him out to arm's length in a bubble of pale blue light. It was designed to buffer the wearer against low-velocity kinetic impacts, not telekinetic assault, and it did exactly nothing to protect him now.

"That sort of stupidity is what brought you to these straits; it will not remove you from them."

A rib cracked, then another, and the pressure was so great now that he could not draw breath at all. Piett triggered the armor's weapons, hoping against hope to do the girl some kind of damage.

Blaster bolts fired from his right arm, burning small, molten pockmarks into the heavy grey alloy of a structural beam at the far end of the bridge. From his left wrist, a stream of explosive darts licked out, tearing a flashing, booming line across three of the tertiary control stations. The power that held him in place prevented him from moving his arms to target her, rendering those weapons useless.

The young woman before him tilted her head a bit to one side, her silvery hair rippling slightly as she considered him.

"What a small, pathetic, passionless creature you are, Piett. Don't you _want_ to live?"

More ribs went, and his vision was going black around the edges. More blaster fire did nothing, and even though one of the blazing arcs from the omni-directional electrical discharge actually crackled across her torso, the black polychrome of her own armor shed the discharge effortlessly. As the world faded into a muddled confusion of roaring sound and gathering night, he thought he saw her shake her head sadly.

"None of you are really strong enough to be of any use to me, are you? None of you have any _fire_ ".

After that it all went to ringing and roaring and shadows and darkness, and the very last thing Xander Harris thought as he came back to himself for one brief moment was that this was not in any way her fault. He still loved her, and he always _would_ love her.

And then he died.

  
* * * * *   


O'Neill knew the next few minutes would be tricky. Fortunately, since he was largely responsible for designing the security measures intended to keep someone from breaking into the Control room and seizing control of the Stargate, he was well-qualified for the task at hand. Namely, breaking into the control room and seizing Control of the Stargate.

Dressed in their covert-ops uniforms, and burdened with a full weapons loadout and a fairly ridiculous amount of C-4, he and the others managed to reach the lower access corridor without incident. While he entered his passcode, Carter started up yet another round of questioning.

"Daniel... are you _sure_ about the timeframe of this? I mean, given that the Goa'uld invasion you witnessed took place in a parallel reality, there's nothing to say that the events there, if they occur in our world at all, might not be months, or even years away."

The archeologist shook his head in frustration; he'd been trying to get someone, _anyone_ , to take his story seriously for days, and the strain was definitely showing.

"Sam, all I have is the Gate address. We know the Goa'uld are coming and we know that they'll crush us when they get here. I don't think it'll hurt anything if we get there a little early... and it isn't like we have a choice, since Kinsey has already given the order to shut us down."

The door slid open, and they all filed through. Carter secured the doors behind them. There were others ways to access the Control room, but those would have to be sealed from a console there. O'Neill hurried up the stairs, applied his palm to the plate beside the interior door, and typed in another code when the readout there prompted him. 

"Kinsey is as big a problem as the damn snakes, or near enough," he told the others as the door slid aside and they entered. "If he wasn't so busy throwing his weight around, we could do this right, send through some probes, get a feel for what we're getting into."

"The time for caution has passed, O'Neill," Teal'c said, watching as he and Carter got to work powering up the boards. "All that is left to us is to strike boldly, and hope surprise is sufficient to carry us to victory."

O'Neill glanced at him, then smiled faintly as he started keying in the sequences that would isolate them from the rest of the base.

"'Fortune favors the bold'? I always liked 'Fortune favors the guy with air superiority and secure supply lines', but I suppose we'll just have to take what we can--"

Alarm klaxons sounded, and every single light in both the Control and Gate rooms suddenly blazed to life. He shot a look over at Carter, and she shook her head.

"It wasn't me, sir. Someone's put the entire base on full alert, and I don't think it's because of anything we did." 

He scowled, looking down at his half-completed work. They still hadn't dropped the blast doors in the access corridors, and it would take them at least two minutes to power up the Stargate. He thought fiercely for several seconds, trying to decide whether to fully commit to their impromptu mission or deal instead with whatever threat had triggered the alert. It was only a few seconds' hesitation, and still it was too long, and the choice was made for him.

The upper-level doors slid open, and a full operations crew hurried into the Control room, with General Hammond following close behind. He stopped when he saw them there, staring back at him with their black clothes, stocking caps, and bulging backpacks. Jack watched him realize exactly what they'd been about to do, and exactly where they'd intended to go. He opened his mouth to say... well, _something_ , only to have the older man cut him off with a shake of his head.

"Save it, Colonel, we have more important things to worry about than whether or not you were about to do something stupid."

Carter had stepped back to let the technicians take their positions at the control stations. Now she looked at the General inquiringly.

"What is it, sir?"

He gestured for them all to follow, and headed up the stairs to the briefing room.

"At the moment we're not sure. However, given the timing, I think it's fairly likely that it's Doctor Jackson's Goa'uld invasion."

Daniel literally stumbled in shock, and his face went white.

"We're too late. It's going to happen; what I saw, everyone dying, it's all going to happen. Again."

Much as O'Neill wanted to offer something in the way of optimism, he couldn't think of anything that didn't sound hollow.

  
* * * * *   



	2. Riposte

She stalked around the perimeter of the vast, silent bridge like a restless animal, the icy beauty of her face a mask that failed to hide the rage that filled her. 

So close; she had been so _close_ to crushing one of the Rebellion's most important concentrations of troops and command personnel. The Emperor had entrusted her with her own battle fleet, including the Empire's single most powerful vessel as her flagship, in order to accomplish her mission. The firepower at her command was overwhelming, her victory a forgone conclusion. Once the Hoth base was destroyed--and even more importantly, once the Skywalker boy was eliminated--she would be given the rewards she so richly deserved. She knew this, because she had seen it in visions and dreams; it _would_ happen, provided she did not fail.

"I cannot fail," the pale girl told the empty, echoing bridge, her soft voice little more than a breathy whisper. "I _cannot_ fail!" She shouted as loudly as she was able, her grey eyes glittering with helpless fury. The layered crystal and molecular circuitry of the display monitors nearest to where she stood cracked and sparked, and somewhere overhead one of the massive structural members groaned in protest before she regained control of herself.

It wouldn't matter to the Emperor that whatever it was that had struck the _Executor_ was not her fault. He would see her failure to crush the rebels and kill Skywalker as incompetence, and even worse: as weakness. The other Sith Lords, ever ready to take advantage of a vulnerable rival, would do everything in their power to undermine her, and see to it that her fall from grace was permanent... and fatal. It would all have been for nothing--everything she'd done, the oceans of blood on her hands, everything she had sacrificed, everything that had been taken from her--all for nothing. The climb to power, the drive to succeed beyond anyone's wildest imaginings, the need to stand above every sentient being in the galaxy, save one, was all she had left... and it was slipping from her grasp. 

The empty bridge, and the immense--and immensely powerful--ship beyond it seemed to taunt her, mocking all her ambitions with its vacant silence. She glared at the long rows of glowing consoles and her small fists clenched at her sides.

One person could not operate such a vessel; the very idea was ludicrous. Warships were intentionally designed with their functions separated into isolated, multiply-redundant control channels, each of which then branched and branched again into a widely-dispersed array of command nodes where small teams of crewmen implemented specific orders by operating specific systems. Computers and droids, while useful for sharply-limited support functions, were intentionally designed to be incapable of affecting or controlling anything vital without human supervision. The result was a command and control network that was slightly cumbersome, but also enormously resistant to catastrophic damage... or sabotage. Far too many ships had been lost in the early days of the Republic before the dangers posed by enemy programming experts, the so-called 'Slicers', had been recognized, and that didn't even begin to address incidents such as the one which had befallen the _Katana_ fleet....

She stalked across the command deck yet again, the _clickclickclick_ of her stiletto boots and the faint whisper of her trailing skirt across the deck the only sounds for the full minute this required. The sight of Piett's broken body just made her walk faster, past his wide, staring, eyes; eyes which, strangely, seemed to hold something disturbingly akin to forgiveness.

"Idiot," she hissed softly, her stride lengthening, even though there was nowhere to go and nothing worthwhile she could attempt. Even had she not killed the Captain, two people would have been no better than just one. Although the _Executor_ could maintain its basic functions without a crew for some time, it needed at least several hundred personnel to fly and operate even at minimal capacity, and to actually fight the ship in any useful way would require _thousands_.

Impotent hate, fiery rage, and a desperate, lonely terror all swirled through her in a vortex that threatened to leave her paralyzed and helpless, and she forced herself to stop her useless pacing, take the deepest breath her scarred lungs could manage, and regain control. There was no shame in emotion; far from it, for anger, hate and fear were all vital, primal, things, and the wellsprings from which a Sith drew her power. Yet despite that, emotion without focus was worse than useless; it became a weapon that turned against the one who wielded it.

Sinking slowly to the deck before one of the large viewports, the black-clad girl folded her legs into a lotus beneath her, her upright posture enforced as much by the flexchrome armor she wore as by her own ruthless discipline. Closing her eyes, she centered herself; gathering her thoughts, ordering her memories....

* * * * *

She had been innocent, once. A child, born on a harsh desert world, bearing a name that perfectly matched her bright and carefree nature. When the Jedi came, when they found her, recognized her potential, and took her, crying, from her mother, she lost much of that, forever.

A child is not equipped to make a decision that will change the course of their life so profoundly. A child does not understand self-sacrifice, and the greater good. Given the choice, a child will choose to stay in the warmth and safety of her mother's arms... but the strangers didn't give her that choice, they simply took her. Her new life as a Jedi began with heartbreak and tears, and the years that followed were more of the same.

True, there were a few pleasant surprises. Almost as soon as the training began, she found herself ahead of her peers in terms of physical ability, and the gap was even more pronounced when her Force powers began to manifest in earnest. The joy of her awakening power was the one bright thing in the girl's new world; the grim, stern, and sterile world of the Jedi. Forbidden to contact her mother, forbidden to play, forbidden to love, the Jedi focused all their energies on erasing the person she had only just started to become. They had no interest in that person; what she would have sounded like as she laughed or sang, how she would have danced, who she would have gifted with young love's first breathless kiss... the girl she might have been was destroyed, in favor of what those cold and passionless men and women wanted her to be: a monk, a peacekeeper, a weapon.

And even that could have brought her a certain bleak satisfaction. If she must become one of them, then at least she seemed destined to be the best of them; the most powerful, the most respected... but such was not to be.

She was _too_ strong, too talented. Exercises the other students struggled to perform came effortlessly to her. Contests of skill and speed and strength which pitted her against her fellows provided her not with opponents, but with victims. She tried her best not to be cruel to the others; it wasn't their fault that she was so much better, but at the same time, wasn't she _supposed_ to excel? Wasn't there value in being the best of them all, in using her powers to the fullest?

The answer, shockingly, was 'No'.

The Jedi Masters accused her of arrogance. They stopped measuring her against those her own age, and instead set her against advanced students years older, who were instructed to teach her humility. She suffered her first defeats, and endless, public humiliations, but what she learned was not meek obedience, it was bitterness, and eventually, hatred. In a startlingly short amount of time she began to win against the older students too; first one match, then a scattered few, and soon, all of them. The Masters whispered amongst themselves, words which were never meant for her ears, and which she only caught in bits and snatches--their unease at her rapid advancement, their concern at what they sensed when her mind was momentarily unguarded, and their mingled hope and dread that she might fulfill some ill-defined prophecy which even they seemed not to truly understand. 

And although they disagreed on many things concerning the desert-born girl, in one matter they were of a single mind: Her rebellious nature must be controlled. Her wildness and unpredictability must be subdued. Her need for freedom and individuality would be beaten down, isolated, and burned out of her. She would be taught to conform to the will of the Masters, by any means necessary. This they decided, and this they set out to do.

 

_Buffy sensed someone standing beside her and looked up to find Xander peering over her shoulder at the notebook where she'd been scribbling furiously._

_"Still doing that backstory stuff for the costume version of you?”_

_She nodded, giving him a slightly embarrassed smile as she held the notes up for his inspection._

_“Yep! I don’t think I’d ever actually play one of those games you told me about, with the dice and the rulebooks--my attention span isn’t that long. But still... it’s interesting to think about, you know? What this girl would be like, and how she got to be the way she is, with the evil, and the outfit, and her general badgirl self.”_

_Xander made a vague sound of agreement, too busy reading what she’d written to offer anything more substantial. A few moments later, however, his eyebrows rose to their maximum possible elevation and he regarded her with wide eyes._

_“Wow! Not exactly feelin’ the love for the Jedi, huh, Buff?”_

_She scowled, waving him into the chair across from her as she glanced around. The small cluster of chairs and low tables was otherwise deserted, with most of Sunnydale High’s students either in class or outside enjoying the excellent weather. Reassured that the coast was clear, she was free to vent what she was feeling._

_“They’re horrible! I mean really, really horrible!” She picked up one of the game sourcebooks he’d loaned her, and waved it at him for emphasis. “I read up on them, and they really_ do _this stuff! They take kids away from their parents, usually when they’re teeny-tiny and can’t even understand what’s happening! Then they brainwash them--not allowed to love?! What kind of freaky cult garbage is_ that _?!”_

_Xander frowned, glancing from her face to her notebook and back to her face several times._

_“Well... I guess it is kind of rough on the kids, but the Republic needs Jedi. Without them to help keep the peace, and make sure the Sith don’t wreck everything, it all falls apart.” He grinned faintly. “Which is basically what happened in the movies, right?”_

_She didn’t return his smile._

_“It isn’t funny, Xand. These people, what they’re doing....” She took a deep breath, and rubbed her palms over her skirt a few times, smoothing the fabric over her thighs as she collected herself. “Okay, yes, I know it’s just a story. I know that they’re only characters in the movies and the game, it‘s just that....”_

_He leaned forward, smile vanished now, replaced with genuine concern._

_“It‘s just that... what? Why are you so upset about this?”_

_“Because--” Her fists were clenched, her arms were trembling, and all of a sudden tears were threatening to spill from her eyes. “Because they’re_ Watchers _. Xander, this is what Watchers do, when they find a girl they think will grow up to be a Slayer.” She saw the sudden understanding in his eyes, and the sympathy that came with it, and it helped her breathe, helped her go on. “They track down little girls, they do whatever they have to do to convince her parents to let them take her, and they drag her off to England or wherever. Oh, and if they can’t convince the parents? Well, no big deal, right? Magic makes kidnapping super-easy, so they can go ahead and take the girl anyway. Kids go missing every day; nobody will think it’s weird if there’s one more picture on a milk carton.”_

_He looked at her, horror plain on his face, and she nodded slowly._

_“Giles told me once, when I asked what would have happened if they’d found me when they were supposed to, years and years ago. It’s the same, the same thing that they do in this make-believe universe of yours.” She lowered her eyes to the small stack of rulebooks there, and her voice turned bitter. “’Sacrifices must be made’, right? ‘All for the greater good’ they say, and then they take some little girl, and they abuse her for years--and don’t pretend for a second that all this isn’t a kind of abuse--and then when she’s grown up enough to fight the bad guys, they throw her into that meat-grinder, where she has to fight constantly if she wants to stay alive....” She shuddered, revulsion making her skin crawl as if she were covered in spiders. “And these are the good guys? Really?” She shook her head slowly. “No. Not at all. I don’t blame her; this person you’re dressing me up as tomorrow night, I don’t blame her for turning against the people who took her. If it had been me, I would have fought them too. I would have killed every one of them I could find.” She looked up, and met his eyes once more. “And someday, if I ever manage to get the Hellmouth taken care of for good? I think I might pay a visit to the Watchers. They’re used to dealing with scared little girls. It’s time to show them what they’ve really been messing with, all this time.”_

_Xander nodded slowly._

_“I don’t think anyone is going to argue with that. And I honestly never noticed how much alike the Watchers and Jedi really are--they both have a Council that runs things, too.” He flipped idly through the notebook he still held. “So, obviously I didn’t mean for this costume thing to be this stressful in the, um, semi-autobiographical sense. If you need to make some changes, or go as someone else, I’ll understand.”_

_Buffy managed a small, uncertain smile as she shook her head._

_“It’s okay, I’m good, I’m fine with this.” After a moment’s thought, however, she tilted her head and gave him a shy-seeming, coy little look through her lashes. “Although... since you brought it up, I did make a few little changes. Tiny ones, really. Nothing anyone would complain about.”_

_He was too engrossed in what he’d found on a certain page to look up at her._

_“Oh, sure; like I said, whatever you need, I’m sure it’s totally--WHAAAAT?” His head snapped up and he stared at her in utter disbelief. With theatrical slowness he turned the notebook and showed her a page full of single, odd-looking words, some crossed out and others underlined or circled._

_“You changed the name? The_ name _?!?”_

_Buffy just smiled sweetly at him, reached out and retrieved her notes, and went back to writing. For his part, Xander spent the next ten minutes staring off into space, too traumatized to speak, move, or even close his gaping mouth._

  
* * * * *  


“Does anybody happen to have a clean set of underwear I can borrow? Boxer briefs. Medium. Cotton, preferably.”

O’Neill’s attempt at gallows humor fell painfully flat; no one in the briefing room could tear their eyes away from the image in the monitor.

“Is this right? I mean, are we sure that some property of the hull isn’t confusing our radar?” Carter’s question made Jack look at the General, but Hammond shook his head.

“As far as we can tell our readings are accurate, Captain. The ship you see there,” he nodded at the screen. “Is roughly nine _teen_ kilometers long--nearly twelve miles. Our best guess puts the mass of the thing at over three billion tons--which is more than all the waterborne ships on Earth, both military and civilian, _combined_.”

Jack let out a low whistle, trying to imagine how much firepower that might represent. Given the destructive capabilities of Goa’uld energy weapons, and scaling them up to what might be feasibly mounted on a warship that size....

“No, seriously,” he said out loud. “That underwear thing. I’m open to boxers, if that’s all you’ve got. Or even just plain briefs.”

Daniel gave him an exasperated look before turning back to face Hammond.

“I don’t understand; when Earth was attacked in the other reality, I didn’t see a ship like this. They were using the pyramid ships, like the one Ra landed on Abydos.”

Teal’c, who had been impassively observing the proceedings, stirred.

“This design is not known to me. Still, many of the Goa’uld System Lords are very old, reclusive, and in possession of ships and technology unique to themselves. It is possible that the activities of the Tau’ri have roused one such who has not been active for many thousands of years.”

Everyone looked at Daniel, who could only shrug.

“Well, we know the Goa‘uld have been a spacefaring species for at least thirty thousand years, and maybe quite a bit longer. Given that much time to find, build or steal technology, I suppose it would be surprising if there _weren’t_ huge variations in the ships and weapons we see the Goa’uld using.”

While the others were having this discussion, Carter had seated herself at the table and logged into her laptop. Now she glanced up at them, and indicated the large screen.

“Sirs, I ran back the logs from the radar stations that are tasked with orbital detection. There’s no record of that ship entering orbit; it just appeared, exactly twenty-one minutes ago.” She frowned, pulled up another screen full of symbols and dotted lines, and shook her head. “Actually, it never entered orbit at all; it isn’t orbiting _now_. It’s just... hanging there, twenty-four thousand, eight hundred kilometers above the surface.”

O’Neill frowned, rubbing meditatively at his jaw.

“That’s too high for any ICBM we’ve got; they’re made to throw bombs _across_ continents and oceans, not fifteen thousand miles straight up.”

General Hammond nodded in agreement, then looked over as Master Sergeant Harriman entered and handed over a sheaf of printed pages.

“We’ve received a reply to your request for activation of the Alpha Site protocol, sir,” the bespectacled serviceman informed him.

Hammond nodded without looking away from the pages he was skimming.

“Thank you, Master Sergeant.” He paused, nodded again as he found the relevant section, and raised his gaze to his subordinate. “They’ve given us a go. Begin assembling these personnel immediately, and recall anyone on the list who’s off-base. We need to start transferring them through the Gate as soon as humanly possible.” The man hurried away, and Hammond gave Jack a sober look. “I don’t know what else we’re going to be able to do against this thing, other than getting three hundred and eighty-five of our best people into that lifeboat.”

O’Neill tried to come up with something glib, but he was feeling pretty grim himself, just then.

“Maybe they’ll be overconfident, Sir. If they land troops and try for a ground invasion we’ll tear them a new orifice or two.”

The older man nodded, lips moving into a faint, wintery smile.

“We can only hope.” He started from the room, still sorting papers, then stopped short, stared at what was written on the page, then turned and looked at them all. “Well, as difficult as it is to believe, my day actually just got worse. For some reason he’s not seen fit to share with me, Colonel _Samuels_ is on his way here.”

  
* * * * *  


On the bridge of the _Executor_ , Lady Taleene’s eyes opened, their crystalline grey glittering with fresh determination. 

_I know what to do_ , she thought, even as she unfolded her legs and rose to her feet with effortless grace. _I’d forgotten about the experimental systems they built into this ship. The redundant command and control backbone, linked to a new, fifth-generation Artificial Intelligence Network, all designed to reduce the crewing requirements of Imperial Warships without it leading to another_ Katana _incident_.

The Sith nodded to herself, her expression half grim, half hopeful. Even if the never-tested system worked as the research scientists had promised, without a crew the massive warship would be unable to utilize more than a fraction of its firepower. Taleene would need to determine her present location, plot a course, and somehow get the ship and herself back to Imperial space without fighting any major engagements. A Rebel task force probably wouldn’t be any great threat, but a full Battle Fleet would make short work indeed of the empty vessel.

_And even if I do manage to survive to reach home, then what? I still will have failed. I’ll be cast down, stripped of my rank, and probably my life. I can defeat any foe in battle, save the Emperor himself, but even I cannot fight_ everyone.

She looked out of the viewport, down at the world below. The _Executor_ was keeping station above the western edge of a continent that was currently in full night. Even so, vast swaths of light blazed against the darkness; an unmistakable sign of a sprawling and industrialized civilization. Taleene traced the outlines of large cities, wondering if the inhabitants were human or alien, and wondering how they would react to a lost and sullen Sith girl declaring herself their Empress. Her pale lips twisted themselves into a bitter little smirk, and she came surprisingly close to uttering a soft laugh before something touched the edge of her mind, and she went very still. With unblinking eyes still watching the world below, she felt a vague unease come and settle itself against the base of her spine.

It was entirely possible that this world, industrialized or not, had yet to develop space travel. It was also possible that they did possess ships, or at the very least weapons, that could reach the hovering warship. At the moment, the _Executor_ was utterly helpless; unable to move, fight, or even raise her shields without human hands touching controls in a dozen different locations, all widely dispersed, separated by kilometers of corridors and lift shafts. 

Taleene considered her options, then nodded firmly to herself: activating the AI control linkages would solve all of those problems at once, therefore that would be her goal. Unfortunately, the profound (and entirely justified) paranoia of Imperial ship designers meant that bringing the system online would require undertaking a similarly arduous journey through those same corridors and lifts. It would take her at least an hour, more likely two, to implement the activation protocols. With a last look at the nameless world, she turned and strode towards the rear of the bridge. The Force was whispering to her; softly as of yet, but with definite purpose, and she had a feeling that bringing that system online was something best done sooner, rather than later.

  
* * * * *  


The really unbelievable part was how _smug_ Samuels looked as he laid it all out for them.

“--Two Naquadah-enhanced warheads, which we anticipate will generate an explosive yield in excess of 1000 megatons. _Each_.” Daniel and Teal’c clearly didn’t grasp the significance of that number, but Jack and Sam exchanged an incredulous look. Samuels smiled that smarmy smile once more, and continued. “The warheads--which we’re calling our ’Goa’uld Busters’-- are sheathed in our most advanced anti-radar materials, and have already been placed on a pair of experimental high-orbit boosters at Vandenberg. Launch will take place in...” He paused and glanced at his wristwatch. When he looked up, his smirk was insufferable. “Whoops. I seem to have lost track of time while I was coming through security. The vehicles launched three minutes ago.”

Carter, unable to contain herself any longer, stood up and faced the Colonel directly.

“Are you _insane_? Do you know what happens when you detonate a nuclear weapon in space? When we tried it, back in the sixties, it generated an Electromagnetic Pulse that affected a huge portion of Earth’s surface. And you want to do it again, but with bombs a thousand times bigger?”

Samuels gave her the sort of condescending look one gives a small, not-very-bright child.

“If I may say so, _Captain_ , I’d say it’s worth a few blown fuses and broken light bulbs to stop an alien invasion.”

“It’s going to be closer to an entire hemisphere landing back in the eighteenth century than blown fuses, _sir_ , and that’s assuming there’s no radiation fallout from the detonations. No one’s ever tested a Naquadah-enhanced device of anywhere _near_ this--”

“Captain, enough.” General Hammond held her gaze until she finally nodded curtly and took a step back, then he turned to Samuels. “Obviously we’re willing to accept a certain amount of collateral damage if the alternative is annihilation, but what you haven’t shown me is your evidence that we’re actually _facing_ annihilation.”

That got him a genuinely confused look in return.

“General?”

“What I’m asking, Samuels, is how we know that these people are hostile?” He made a dismissive gesture. “Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying we should try and make friends with the Goa’uld. Everything we know about them tells us that there is no chance of peaceful coexistance with them. But that--” He pointed at the sleek, arrowhead image on the large screen. “That doesn’t match any known Goa’uld vessel. And they’ve made no hostile gestures since they arrived. So don’t you think we might want to at least try talking to them, and verify that they _are_ Goa’uld before we ram a pair of nuclear weapons into their ship?” 

The other man stared coldly back.

“The decision has been made, General Hammond. The president himself has authorized this pre-emptive strike, as the only sure way to protect our nation and our world.” He touched a button on the keyboard before him, and a countdown appeared on the screen. “The weapons _will_ work, and our enemies _will_ be destroyed... in exactly eighty-four minutes.”

  
* * * * *  


The nodes at the primary junction points of _Executor’s_ engineering backbone were contained within armored vaults large enough to comfortably hold several _Vrykin_ -class assault shuttles. Gaining entry required not only knowledge of the proper access codes, but a properly-configured cybernetic implant of the sort given to all officers of the Imperial Navy... and to the Empire’s Sith Lords as well. 

Taleene entered the long and complex identification code the huge door requested of her, then felt a thrum at the edges of her awareness as her implant was interrogated by the single-minded machine intelligence tasked with defending this sensitive location. She was very aware of the heavy weapon emplacements situated in the high recesses of the chamber, just as she was aware that every one of those weapons were currently trained upon her exact center of mass. She knew these things, and she dismissed them as irrelevant. When the series of armored doors slid aside she strode forward, passing through a short corridor that opened out into a multi-level space that was densely-packed with a dizzying array of optical cables, blocks of quietly humming molecular circuitry, and banks of liquid-crystal switching arrays. Having gained access to the node, she moved with careful haste through the technological labyrinth, most of the illumination coming from several million tiny status lights which glowed in various colors. Deep within the maze of electronic and photonic systems, she located the proper panel. Despite being situated in this heavily-defended sanctum, the interlocks for the AI linkages were behind yet another layer of armor and security protocols. The girl impatiently entered an entirely different set of codes, waited while the system probed her identity with its doggedly-inquisitive sensors, then reached forward when it finally gave her access to the small niche which contained the relay.

It was the work of mere moments to complete this part of her task. A small slab of circuitry taken from its padded restraints and snapped into the gap reserved for it, a row of buttons pressed in a particular sequence, and a circular, gleaming ring pulled out, rotated a hundred and eighty degrees, then pushed back in until it locked into place. When it was done, the status lights within the niche shifted from white to blue, and she withdrew her hand, hurrying back the way she came without bothering to watch the cover slide back into place.

This was the third relay she’d activated, which left her twelve more to do. When she exited the node vault she paused, turning her head as if listening to some far-away voice.

_Danger. Fire. Death._

Her eyes went glassy, the pupils dilating hugely, then contracting to tiny points. Something was coming; rushing towards her now, at this very moment. Distant yet, but coming closer with every passing moment.

Taleene shook her head violently, making her white-blonde hair fly, and blinked as her eyes returned to normal.

“Not enough time,” She whispered to herself, her face grim. “Not enough _time!_ ”

She headed for the next node at a run.

  
* * * * *  


The next group of personnel moved through the Stargate, each of them carrying as much gear as they could manage. At the foot of the ramp, technicians were loading the bulkier items onto MALPs, but their supply of the wheeled probes was limited, and the pile of equipment slated to go through to the Alpha Site was mountainous.

_And no matter how much we manage to send through, they’ll still be short of everything,_ Jack thought, watching the disciplined frenzy from the briefing room observation window. _How do you recreate a civilization with less than four hundred people, and a single roomful of stuff?_

He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, because if it did, Earth’s revenge upon its destroyers would be a long, long time coming. Turning back to the briefing room, his eyes automatically went to the large flatscreen on the wall. The numbers at the bottom were counting down from thirty-nine minutes, the graphic showing the two missiles on the far side of the planet, roughly opposite the symbol designating the enormous alien ship. Even though they had launched from almost directly below the vessel, the physics involved required a full orbit of the Earth for mere rockets to reach that altitude. The blocks of alphanumerics beside each missile icon showed their steady climb was continuing, right along the dotted lines laid out before them. Samuels and his crew had set up their operation there at the big table, and all of them looked confident, even a little excited. Carter was off to one side, talking into a phone with determined patience, trying to convince someone at the Pentagon to let her issue a warning to the public. 

“--Hospitals at the very least, sir. Yes. Yes, I realize that, but it’s very likely that all of North America is about to lose electrical power, probably for weeks, very possibly months. Yes, sir, it’s really that bad. The EMP effects will destroy key portions of the transmission grid, and replacing them will take a very long time. No, sir, I’m _not_ saying... no, sir, I’m not saying we should surrender....” She couldn’t help the little growl of frustration that escaped her. “Sir, I feel I must point out--again--that no one has asked for our surrender. They--No, sir, I don’t think it _is_ a loaded gun aimed at our heads. Sir. Yes, sir. Yes, but--”

General Hammond joined him, and the two of them watched the missile team chattering into their headsets, which were linked to their counterparts at Vandenberg.

“No luck with the President?” Jack asked. The older man shook his head.

“No. He’s committed to this strike.” Hammond sighed, and for a moment looked weary, and just a little uncertain. “I can’t even say for sure that he’s wrong, Jack. If this _is_ a Goa’uld who just happens to use a different style of ship and technology, then waiting for them to make the first move might end up killing us all.” He looked at O’Neill. “Is that the kind of risk you can afford to take when your entire world is on the line?”

Jack nodded in acknowledgement of his point, but couldn’t keep himself from asking a question in return.

“Fair enough, but if we go around nuking anyone who looks at us funny, do you think we’re going to find friends out there, or just more enemies?” He looked at the images on the smaller monitors, which held the highest-resolution photos they had of the alien vessel. The long, sleek arrowhead had a starkly dangerous look to it, but the clean lines of the thing held very little resemblance to the overly-ornate designs favored by the Goa’uld he’d encountered.

Whatever Hammond’s reply would have been, it was forestalled when Samuels looked up, saw them, and smiled.

“All systems are nominal, General. There’s been no reaction at all from the Goa’uld; they have no idea what’s about to hit them.” He nodded towards the observation windows that overlooked the Gate room. “With all due respect, sir, there’s really no point in bothering with the fallback operation until we see the results of our attack.” His smile widened slightly. “And with a combined yield of over two gigatons, it’s doubtful that there will be anything left of that ship but molten slag.”

Hammond narrowed his eyes, and responded with obvious sarcasm.

“Well, thank you for that advice, Colonel, but if it’s all the same to you, we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing. In the meantime, feel free to carry on with your unprovoked and ill-advised sneak attack on an unknown and possibly friendly ship of undetermined destructive capability.”

Samuels blanched, and spent several seconds looking for a civil reply (a Colonel did _not_ call out a General on his tone or attitude; not if he wanted to _stay_ a Colonel), but Jack stepped in before he could collect himself.

“Hey, I was looking at your fancy graphs and diagrams here, and I have a question.” Both men turned to look at him, and he gave them a tight smile. “This thing isn’t in orbit, right? It’s holding position over one spot on the ground?”

Samuels blinked, then nodded, slowly, unsure of where this was going.

“Yes, that’s true. So?”

Jack shrugged.

“Well, just out of curiosity... what spot? What’s there?”

The other Colonel frowned, as if the matter had never even occurred to him.

“Southern California, obviously. Somewhere on the coast, I think.”

Hammond’s curiosity had been roused now, too, and he scrutinized the big screen more closely.

“And there’s nothing there?”

It was Samuels’ turn to shrug.

“Nothing important.”

  
* * * * *

Sunnydale, California  
9:27pm

Leia Organa, former Princess, former Senator, current high-level officer in the Rebel Alliance, was having a very strange day.

The last thing she remembered was Tatooine, and Jabba’s slave-barge palace. Their attempt to rescue Han had been going well enough, despite a misstep or two (one of which had led directly to her current, somewhat revealing, Slave-girl outfit), and she had just finished strangling the vile Hutt gangster with the very chain he had used to bind her to his throne. Then, just moments after Artoo had cut her bonds, she had somehow found herself here, in this unfamiliar place.

“Cooookie! Me want coookie _now!_ ”

An oddly-shapeless creature, waist-high, with shaggy blue fur and huge, googly eyes staggered past where she stood, in determined pursuit of three human-looking women in matching brown uniforms.. They all shrieked in terror and ran, bare legs flashing, their oversized shoulder bags spilling small rectangular boxes as they fled. The creature slowed just long enough to scoop up each box, cramming them whole into its enormous mouth before hurrying after the women.

“Mmm, NomNomNom!” It half-shouted, crumbs and bits of packaging flying everywhere. “Thin-Mint cooookie! More! Me want _more_! Come back, Scout-girls!”

Leia backed up, staring around as she tried to process what was happening. 

_One of the frontier worlds? There are a lot of humans, but most of them are dressed strangely, and very differently from each other. That suggests somewhere with multiple cultures, but I don’t recognize_....

A towering humanoid with jagged scars snaking over his huge, square-ish head stomped across the street, making inarticulate groans. A moment later a bellowing, animalistic roar made her jump, and a nearly naked man leapt atop a nearby vehicle, and from there onto the clumsy giant. The newcomer probably massed less than a third what his opponent did, yet he quickly gained the upper hand, slashing viciously with a large knife, and deftly avoiding the slow counterblows with amazing agility and speed. In moments the creature was down, its neck nearly severed, those huge hands twitching uselessly.

The human crouched beside it, tilting his head and peering at it suspiciously, then he sniffed the air, turned, and looked straight at her.

Leia wished for a blaster, cleared her throat, and tried her most reassuring smile.

“Hello. I’m wondering if you could tell me which planet--”

“What is this place?” The man growled, the soft words somehow carrying clearly over the shouts, screams and crashes from all around them. “This....” He seemed to have trouble finding the words he wanted, as if the very act of speaking was foreign to him. “This is not... my home. My jungle.” He stood, and began to stalk toward her. She saw that his skin, though naturally pale, had been darkened by long exposure to sun and weather. Wearing only a small loincloth, he actually made her feel modestly dressed, though he carried off his near-nakedness well, with a powerful, lithely-muscled physique.

Leia raised one hand, palm out, and was gratified to see him stop, about five meters away.

“Oh. All right, so you don’t know where we are, either?” He shook his head mutely, dark eyes meeting hers with a feral intensity. “Well, fair enough. Maybe we can work together, and figure out how--”

A chorus of ear-splitting shrieks assailed her ears, and the savage warrior before her spun to meet the new threat.

Leia’s first thought was that they were children.

She could not have been more wrong.

A horde of small creatures, no larger than Jawas but sporting horns, claws and gleaming fangs, flung themselves at the man, much as he had flung himself at the giant a minute earlier. The man roared in fury, lashing out with fist, knife, and feet, and with every blow one of the creatures went flying. Yet for each one he struck, two more scrambled towards him and onto him, clutching at his limbs, slowing his movements, biting and tearing at his exposed flesh with vicious glee.

Despite herself, Leia found herself shrinking back. She thought of herself as brave, she had faced many dangers, survived some truly hopeless battles. This, however, was enough to fill her with undiluted terror... because she knew, now, what was happening.

_Rakghoul plague. I’m in the middle of a Rakghoul outbreak_.

Eons ago, a crazed Sith Lord created a virulent disease as a weapon; a plague which destroyed the mind and mutated the body of those it infected. Sporadic outbreaks still occurred, millennia later, and few things were more horrifying to behold. Once infected, victims usually transformed in a matter of hours. And once transformed, no known medical treatment could restore the body... or the mind.

The savage fought bravely, fiercely, but there were dozens of Rakghouls, and he soon went down under a living wave of shrieking creatures. Leia looked wildly about, then picked a direction at random and fled. The darkness might help hide her, if she could escape their line of sight.

_Weapon, I need a weapon. I can’t afford to let them near me, or let them touch me. One bite, one scratch, is all it takes_....

She tried to run faster, and he dainty slave-girl sandals were soon lost, leaving her barefoot and half-naked. Reaching an intersection, taking note of the strangely primitive ground vehicles parked everywhere without taking the time to try and puzzle them out, she headed toward the sounds of gunfire.

 

Behind her, down one of the darkened side-streets she had just passed by, something stirred. A moderately-tall, slightly bulky figure straightened, and turned his head to stare after the running woman. With careless disinterest, he tossed aside the beautiful girl’s head, not caring that it landed atop the disemboweled corpse of her boyfriend. Machete in hand, the figure strode after the fleeing woman, his strides slow and unhurried.

  
* * * * *  


Taleene pulled the ring toward her, rotated it, and slammed it home. The status lights shifted from white to blue, but she wasn’t there to see it; her rushing footsteps receded at a run as she hurled herself through the twists and turns that led out of the node, rebounding from conduits and consoles at every turning of the way, trusting her armor to protect her from serious injury.

_Eleven of them activated, four more to go._

The Force was screaming at her now, warning that time was running out, that every passing second brought her destruction closer.

She reached the corridor and moved into a full-out sprint, her stiletto-heeled boots slamming down one after the other in quick succession, every motion one of precise, machine-like speed.

The Sith was straining now; her breath coming in rapid, pained wheezes despite all that the medicomps and pharmacopoeia in her armor could do. 

_Eleven months since Merrick left me by that volcano, burning and broken. Eleven months, and everything that medical science and Sith magic can do still can’t make me whole._

The armor helped her breathe, dispensed medications into her bloodstream, protected the pale, syntho-organic skin that had replaced her own carbonized epidermis. A web of microscopic fibers had largely supplanted her ravaged nervous system, and only dozens of surgeries and the near-infinite resources of the Empire had allowed her to avoid multiple amputations and cybernetic limb replacements. Taleene was every bit as beautiful, quick, and graceful as she had been before that disastrous duel, but her rebuilt body would never have the strength or the stamina it had once possessed.

And yet, where the body failed, the mind found a way.

Her strides lengthened, her trailing skirts fluttering behind her, boots striking the deck a meter apart as she ran, then two meters, then three. Five. Ten. 

The corridor walls became a blur as she wrapped her body in a sheath of invisible, telekinetic power and propelled herself forward like a projectile fired from a railgun. Ahead of her, a bank of lifts awaited, ready to take her to the next node, located twenty decks down and a kilometer aft, towards the main Engineering core. Taleene slowed, but didn’t stop. A sharp gesture ripped the doors from one of the tubes, and she shot through the ragged opening, rebounding off the far side with force enough to leave her bruised and shaken, armor or no... then she was falling. Looking down the empty shaft, she gathered her concentration once more. Accelerating downwards with more impetus than artificial gravity alone would have provided, still struggling to drag air into her aching chest, she searched the dimly lit tube for the markings which would indicate her destination.

* * * * *  


“--At this point, what can it _hurt_ to try and talk to them?!”

Daniel’s frustration was palpable, and Jack sympathized with him. General Hammond obviously did too, it was just that there was nothing he could do. By now the President and the Joint Chiefs were secure in some mile-deep bunker, and obviously not inclined to let an Archeologist speak on behalf of Earth. Besides, the officially-sanctioned greeting was already on its way, emerging now from behind the curvature of the planet and arching up towards the enigmatic vessel. Jack folded his arms and waited to see what would happen.

Fourteen minutes to go.

  
* * * * *  


So far, Leia had done surprisingly well at avoiding the roving Rakghoul packs. The entire settlement was engulfed in chaos, and scattered fires gave the place a strange, nightmarish feel, even leaving aside the horror of the plague outbreak.

_And I still can’t quite wrap my head around the bizarre differences in technology levels. A few of these people are using what look like energy weapons, but others are using chem-powered slug-throwers, and most of them don’t have anything better than knives and clubs._

She made it to the next street, felt an odd, sudden premonition, and ran diagonally across the intersection, barely reaching the cover of an overturned groundcar before shouts sounded behind her. Peeking back the way she’d come, she saw a handsome-looking human male; black skin, black hair, black formalwear, and sleek black goggles covering his eyes, stumble backwards and sprawl in the street, a huge wound gaping diagonally from his right shoulder to left hip. A small, silvery device fell from his lifeless hands, and Leia’s eyes went wide as she saw his killer step forward.

It was a woman; statuesque, beautiful, with striking red hair and a metallic outfit that rivaled Leia’s own for brevity. Although the woman’s ‘armor’ was utterly impractical, the sword she held was demonstrably effective. With a haughty sneer for her fallen foe, she turned her regal head slowly, surveying the scene, then pivoting smoothly as the clop and clatter of some large beast’s hooves sounded loudly against the pavement. An instant later, a huge equine, coat shimmering white in the uncertain light, came charging into view, running full at the warrior woman.

She reacted with impressive speed, raising her sword for an overhead, two-handed blow that would have felled even so large a creature instantly.

The blow never landed. The equine struck her with the force of an avalanche, the long, white, spiraled horn in the center of it’s forehead spearing the woman in the bare space precisely between her magnificent, armored breasts. Blood fountained, and the creature never slowed; it simply kept going, the woman’s limp body held high like some gory trophy. 

As the sound of those hooves faded away, Leia edged into the open. Luck, she knew, would only carry her so far. She _had_ to have a weapon. When she reached the dark male’s body she stopped, noting the tiny device he had been holding when he died. It was a weapon, she supposed, if only barely. Silvery, gun-shaped, but small enough to be completely engulfed by even _her_ hands, it certainly didn’t look to have done its former owner much good.

Motion drew her eyes in the direction from which she’d originally come, and she saw a nondescript humanoid figure walk unhurriedly into view. Nothing about him seemed especially frightening; even the white plastic mask he wore wouldn’t have been out of place on many worlds she had visited, where custom or environmental necessity required such things. And yet, the moment her eyes touched him, she felt a surge of fear that exceeded even the terror of the Rakghoul plague. Something inside her, some intuition or instinct, told her that he meant to kill her.

Ignoring the tiny gun, Leia took another step forward, snatched up the woman’s fallen sword, and then backed away. When she saw the heavy-bladed weapon in his hand, she turned and ran as fast as her sore feet would carry her.

_He looks slow; all I need to do is stay ahead of him, stay away from the Rakghoul, and get to the spaceport before someone slaps a quarantine on this place. As Han would say, ‘Hey, no problem!’_

  
* * * * *  


The last of the personnel slated to go to the Alpha Site were through the gate, and Hammond had ordered it shut down, at least for the moment. O’Neill strongly suspected that if the warheads didn’t work, and the situation looked hopeless, the General planned to reopen the Gate and evacuate everyone in the base to their fallback outpost. Watching the men hunched over their consoles, he wondered if Samuels would be offered that same option. 

Somehow he doubted it. He felt someone behind him, and turned his head to see Carter joining the rest of them in their vigil. He nodded to her, and her lips twitched faintly, in a feeble try at something that might have been an encouraging smile. Without a word, he turned back to the monitor.

Three minutes.

  
* * * * *  


Taleene’s vision blurred for a moment, and she had to blink furiously in order to bring things back into focus. When her eyesight cleared, she was vaguely surprised to find she’d fallen to her hands and knees, her sweat-sodden hair spilling forward past her shoulders to pool on the deck plates. Exhaustion dragged at her like a multi-ton weight, but she shook her head, lips drawing back from her teeth in a snarl.

“No. _No! I won’t be weak. I. Will. Not. Fail!_ ”

Her fury drove her to her feet, and her hate; the hatred she felt for the Jedi, for Piett, for the Rebellion, and most of all for herself, that hatred kept her upright as she staggered to the access hatch.

The corridor was as wide as a six-lane highway, and it stretched from the massive blast doors of the main engineering vault, just a few meters behind her, to the equally-solid doors guarding the Auxiliary Bridge, nearly twelve-hundred meters further forward. This section was the deepest, most heavily-shielded part of the ship, thus the central trunks of the most critical systems resided here. The side-tunnel she took opened into the entrance to the Prime Systems Node, and despite her best efforts she stumbled twice before she reached the meter-thick slab of armor that served as the outermost access hatch.

Every synthetic nerve in her body was screaming that she was nearly out of time; images of blinding white fire and sudden oblivion were crowding the edges of her vision. With a wrenching effort that sent tears streaming down her pale cheeks, she banished the Force visions, and gave her full attention to what her hand was doing. Holding her mind in laser-tight focus, she keyed in her access code. The idiot-savant of the security system digested the numbers and letters, considered the configuration and coding of her cybernetic implants, came to a decision, and opened the door for her, along with the five identical doors just beyond it.

Taleene lunged forward, nearly fell, recovered, hurried on, bounced off of an awkwardly-placed bank of alloy and crystal relay circuits, and finally staggered to the central processing hub for the experimental system. The distrust of such powerful machine intelligences was deeply ingrained, and on a purely practical level such a network, no matter how sophisticated its defenses, was always vulnerable to manipulation by the enemy. Even so, the advantages offered by such computer support were enough to tempt even the most paranoid, and so... this.

With hands that were as steady as her blazing will could make them, Taleene keyed the release for the hub, watched as the heavy alloy covering retracted, and nodded when she saw the AI core itself. Gleaming in shades of silver and grey, it was a block of ultra-dense molecular circuitry the size of a human head. Her Sith powers meant that Taleene was quite strong, but when she lifted it from the storage clamps she strained slightly to hold it steady. A blue-white shimmer raced over the flat surfaces of the cube, and as she moved to settle it into the socket designed to hold it, Taleene’s eyes blurred again, a sudden wave of dizziness made the room seem to shift....

  
* * * * *  


The Asche-Dagon Sanctuary  
1056 Days Down-Time

“Do you feel that, brothers?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“I do.”

“A chaos-event, yes, but the _power_ of it!”

“The timeline is twisting; in a moment it will tear free entirely.”

“Reality will reform; coalesce into a new shape, along a sharply-divergent path.”

“This version of ourselves will be erased, and with us, our only hope to preserve the artifact.”

“All our plans have come to naught. All our work to create the mind, and the tales we have written upon the blank pages of the mind to ease its way.”

“We have failed.”

“Failed.”

“...No.”

“No?”

“There is a way; only now, only in this moment, when all is in flux.”

“Yes, I see your meaning.”

“Dangerous.”

“True, but she _is_ the protector we have chosen; that has not changed.”

“The artifact must be placed in her keeping. This chaos alteration will not prevent the Beast from seeking it out.”

“Agreed.”

“Agreed.”

“Yes. Join your energies to mine, quickly, so that we may perform the sending.”

“We cannot send a physical form to her, as we’d meant to do; not through time.”

“It matters not; the mind is what is important. The essence. All else is illusion.”

“Let it be done. Now.”

“Now.”

“Now.”

“… _Now_.”

  
* * * * *  


With hands that were as steady as her blazing will could make them, Taleene keyed the release for the hub, watched as the heavy alloy covering retracted, and nodded when she saw the empty brackets that would have held the AI core, had it been present on the ship. Since testing of such a fundamental system might require several weeks of analysis and adjustments, it had been postponed until after the completion of the Hoth operation. The AI intended to sit at the center of this electronic web was currently undergoing final checks at the Kuat Drive Yards comp-systems complex.

Taleene nodded again, and slid the strap of the carry-case from her shoulder.

“Luckily, I brought a spare....”

Her slim, black-sheathed fingers moving with careful speed, she undid the latches and opened the lid of the case to reveal the object which she had just retrieved from her private quarters.

Gleaming in shades of silver and grey, it was a block of ultra-dense molecular circuitry the size of a human head. Her Sith powers meant that Taleene was quite strong, but when she lifted it from the case she strained slightly to hold it steady. A green-white shimmer raced over the flat surfaces of the cube, and as she moved to settle it into the socket designed to hold it, Taleene’s eyes blurred again, and a sudden wave of dizziness made the room seem to shift.... 

She shook her head angrily, ruthlessly suppressed an odd chill that danced along her spine, and withdrew her hand as the clamps moved of their own accord to lock the cube into place. She flipped the switches in the required sequence, pulled the ring outwards, rotated it, and shoved it back down with all her might. The status lights within the AI center obediently shifted from white, to blue... and then to deepest, purest emerald, which she had _not_ been expecting.

The voice, however, when it came from the speaker in the ceiling overhead, was familiar, and her eyes closed as her cold, Sith heart broke all over again.

“B-Buffy? Buffy, what’s going on?”

She took a deep breath, spoke as quickly and carefully as she could.

“Listen to me, Dawnie: we‘re in trouble, and I need your help.”

  
* * * * *  


The missiles were flying on pure inertia now, with no exhaust or electronic emissions to betray their presence to the enemy. Ahead of them, the ship loomed, vast and silent, with millions of white lights shining against the darkness.

Everyone in the SGC briefing room was watching the screen now, where two tiny pinpoints were about to merge with the symbol for the alien vessel.

Colonel Samuels’ face was intent as he looked over the instruments manned by his people, then back to the count.

“Fifty seconds,” he intoned solemnly, as if they all couldn’t see that for themselves perfectly well. “Forty seconds.”

  
* * * * *  


“It’s too _big_ , Buffy. It goes on forever, and I keep getting lost.”

Taleene gritted her teeth as she ran down the brightly-lit highway of the axial corridor. Five hundred meters ahead of her, the blast doors of the Auxiliary Bridge loomed.

“My _name_ isn’t Buffy,” she grated, “It’s Talee--” Realizing the absurdity of what she was doing, she started again. “I know it isn’t like your playworld, Dawnie; I know your module wasn’t meant to interface with a ship, but you _have_ to raise the shields, right now!”

Her dead sister’s voice came from every speaker she passed, sounding just as it had the last time she’d heard it in the flesh. Taleene found her mental balance and half-ran, half-flew down the corridor on legs and wings of telekinetic power, and wondered if she were about to join her beloved sister in death.

“Oh, hang on a sec,” came the girlish voice from the access panel that rushed past on her left. “I think I see--”

  
* * * * *  


Being dead wasn’t so bad, really; most of the time, Dawn hardly minded it at all.

She had died from a rare, untreatable neuro-degenerative disease, at eleven years of age. Her sister, Buffy, had been a Jedi-in-training at the time, and even though, strictly speaking, she wasn’t allowed to visit her family, Buffy had managed to sneak away from time to time to see her. It was on one such occasion that she learned of Dawn’s illness. Months passed, and the hospital visits came more and more frequently, lasted longer and longer, and seemed to do less and less to make her feel better. Dawn could see the toll the stress was putting on her sister, though of course Buffy had already been growing bitter and angry over the way the Jedi and other students treated her.

When the end came, on the last night in the hospital, Buffy had appeared without warning. Her face was masklike, pale, and her eyes were colder than Dawn remembered, with nearly all the green drained from them. Without a word she had scooped Dawn up, the child’s emaciated body no burden at all, even for the diminutive teenaged girl. 

Dawn didn’t remember very much after that; just that she was taken someplace bright, and cold, and an ugly man with a very scary face and voice had loomed over her.

“--Beyond even my powers to heal, my young apprentice. Yet perhaps I can still save something of her; the essence of her.”

“Anything. _Please_ , master, whatever you can do, please do it. Our mother is dead; I don’t have anyone else. I don’t have any _thing_ else, of who I was. Please.”

Buffy was crying; Dawn remembered being sad that she’d made Buffy cry. She was pretty sure that Jedi weren’t allowed to cry. She hoped she wouldn’t get her sister in trouble with her teachers.

“Very well. With this technology, and the sorcery of the ancient Sith, I can catch her when this shell fails. I can rescue her from the void, and preserve her for you. This, and the other things we have discussed, will be yours, in exchange for your service, and loyalty.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Then let us begin.”

That was the last memory she had, as a living girl, but it wasn’t the end at all. Instead, she’d woken up in a bright and colorful world, where her body was whole, and healthy, and without pain for the first time in what seemed like forever. And Buffy was there; sometimes as a video window and voice that she could talk to, and sometimes as a bright and colorful version of herself that could interact with Dawn’s playworld and Dawn herself. They went on adventures together, they outwitted silly monsters and found hidden treasures and played in forests that were warm and peaceful and safe. When Buffy couldn’t be there, Dawn played with the friends that the world made for her; a silly clown boy who always made her laugh, a smiling tree-girl with long hair made of trailing leaves, and a kind, fatherly man with glasses who lived in a castle made all of books.

Time passed, and Dawn didn’t change at all. The rules of her world, as much as she could understand them, meant that she _couldn’t_ change. She was always eleven years old, and always Dawnie, exactly as she had been on her first day in this new place. She could learn new things, like the new name the scary old man gave Buffy (though she didn’t much like it, and avoided using it when she could), but her body didn’t age and her mind didn‘t grow up.

Buffy, though... Buffy changed a lot. Learning the things the scary man taught her changed her. When her old Jedi teacher nearly killed her, she changed even more, and not just in the ways that were easy to see.

Still, she loved Buffy with all her heart, and would do anything she could to help her. So, when her playworld suddenly went dark, and still, and then faded to nothing, she tried not to be too scared. And when the world came back, but as an unimaginably vast and complicated maze of metal and lights that seemed to stretch into infinity in all directions, she tried not to be overwhelmed.

“I know it isn’t like your playworld, Dawnie--” Buffy’s voice echoed around her, and the holographic representation of Dawn’s cybernetic self hugged herself, and stared into the far distance, first in one direction, then another.

“I know your module wasn’t meant to interface with a ship, but you _have_ to raise the shields, right now!”

Dawn scowled, unwilling to admit to herself how scary it was that Buffy sounded scared.

“Sure, okay,” she muttered to herself. “Let me just look at every one of these million, ba-jillion do-dads, and see which one of them turns those on....”

Then she stopped. This wasn’t her playworld, the one with the clown, and the treegirl, and the kindly man with his books, but it wasn’t that different, either--in what it _did_ , sure, but not in the way it worked. She didn’t flip switches and push buttons when she was swimming with the glowy whales or flying with the clockwork eagles, she _lived_ it. If she was seeing this place as a maze of glittery light and glass and wire, it was because she wasn’t looking at it in the right way.

“Oh, hang on a sec,” she said, trying to push the words out to where Buffy could hear them. Reaching out, she put both of her faintly glowing hands on the air in front of her, gripped the fabric and structure of the world, and turned it, just a little. 

Everything shifted, and her eyes swam as the perspective changed. Half of the lights became stars, and the rest smeared into something vast, and blurry and unrecognizable. Her fingers and toes tingled fiercely, which she chose to view as a sign she was on the right track.

“I think I see--”

She tugged at the universe again, the stars sharpened, and the blur resolved itself into a blue-white planet floating among them as something in her head seemed to _click_.

  
* * * * *  


“Twelve... Eleven... Ten....”

  
* * * * *  


Taleene’s head was filled with a roaring, as if a wave the size of a world was crashing down on her. Not soon, not in a few minutes or a few seconds, but right _now_. Just ahead of her, the triple-layered, vault-like doors to the Auxiliary Bridge slid aside, and with a last, Force-assisted bound, she flew through the opening. The yielding, intangible web of an anti-concussion field caught her in mid-air, and held her there like an insect suspended in a web. The blast doors slammed shut behind her, and she saw the vast space, twin to the main bridge far above, illuminated in eerie green as one by one, each console’s lights came alive, and glowed that deep shade of emerald... but only half of the consoles had come awake so far.

“Um. The shields are going to be a little late,” Dawn’s voice told her from the ceiling, sounding embarrassed. “Hang on, I have _no_ idea what this is going to--.”

  
* * * * *  


“ _Detonation!_ ”

Half of the men and women in the briefing room erupted in cheers. Everyone else watched the screens, and waited for the wash of static to clear.

  
* * * * *  


Dawn’s world was now multifold and strange, and she had basically no time at all to figure it out. She _was_ the ship, that much was clear; with a body nineteen kilometers long and supported by bones made from battlesteel and rigid forcefields, and at the same time she was still herself, a girl-shaped ghost floating in a virtual space that responded to her needs and commands.

She had found and activated the deflector shield generators a full twelve seconds before the explosions occurred... but those generators were each the size of a small capital ship, and they required thirty seconds to spin up to full power. 

Dawn’s defenses were still forming when the two weapons detonated less than two hundred meters from her hull.

The entire multi-gigaton mass of the _Executor_ surged violently upward, like an ocean-going ship plowing into a towering rogue wave. Power distribution networks flared instantly white-hot as they struggled to meet the sudden demands of structural-reinforcement fields, and shield generators all across her ventral side screamed in overload. The enormous arrays just beneath the hull that served to shape and focus the energies of those defensive barriers strained against the sudden onslaught, but in two locations they failed, and explosions tore through the ship’s engineering spaces.

On the Auxiliary Bridge, Buffy hung in mid-air, suspended in the anti-concussion fields. Curled into as tight a ball as a human could manage, she was isolated from the violent shaking that might otherwise have seriously injured her. Without consciously trying, Dawn found one part of herself there with her sister. Her holographic form glowed in the semi-darkness, three meters tall, large enough to cradle her sister’s form protectively in insubstantial arms and semi-substantial fields. 

As the ship was completely engulfed by expanding spheres of nuclear flame, Dawn lowered her head, closed her eyes, and held Buffy tight.

  
* * * * *  


Leia cut sideways into the creature’s throat, swayed back to avoid the second Rakghoul’s slashing claws, then pirouetted with all the skill and grace of a princess who had spent far too many hours practicing traditional dance in order to please her adoptive parents. With a grunt of effort she brought her sword down, splitting the creature’s skull cleanly in half. Stepping back, she yanked the blade clear, and spent a worried few seconds checking her exposed skin. Just one scratch was all it took; one tiny scratch....

Light flared, throwing shadows straight down from everything in sight, more solid and well-defined than those cast by the nearly full moon. Leia looked up, just like every other human, alien, and Rakghoul in the city. The glowing, double-lobed sphere was instantly recognizable: high-yield nuclear detonations, in a middling-high orbit.

Her heart sank as she considered the implications. Someone up there must be enforcing a blockade, to prevent the outbreak from spreading. Her chances of escaping this backwater world, wherever it was, had just gone down significantly.

Shuffling footsteps caught her attention, and she whirled to find the tall, masked figure startlingly close. His eyes never left her as he advanced, and she lurched into a run once more, leaving behind the five small, mangled figures of the Rakghouls she had dispatched with her improvised swordwork.

  
* * * * *  


The SGC’s screens were being fed data by the best sensors the USAF and NASA had, and the resultant visuals of the double explosion were appropriately spectacular.

“Wow,” O’Neill said, trying to keep it low enough that Samuels wouldn’t hear. Beside him, Carter nodded, working at her laptop as she took her own look at the incoming data feeds.

“The fireballs are roughly twenty-two miles in diameter each. See how long they’re persisting? That’s a side effect of the vacuum environment.” 

Jack glanced at her.

“What about the EMP? Did it turn out as bad as you thought?”

She studied her readouts, performed a burst of rapid-fire typing, read the response, and looked up with an expression of relief.

“No, sir; it’s not bad at all. Hardly any reports of power outages or significant electromagnetic flux.” Her eyes narrowed, and she looked back at the big screen. “It’s almost like something muffled the electromagnetic spike... or absorbed it.”

The overlapping spheres of radiant heat and light were fading, and as the sensors driving their screens were adjusted and recalibrated, an object slowly came into view.

The arrowhead shape was unchanged, seemingly untouched, save for two small patches of hull that glowed dimly yellow, fading towards sullen red. The SGC personnel all looked to Samuels, who was looking several shades paler than usual, and visibly shaken.

“Im _possible!_ ”

  
* * * * *  
[](http://postimage.org/)

 

Taleene opened her eyes, blinking in surprise at finding herself being ‘held’ by a three-meter tall version of her baby sister. The holographic image of Dawn opened her eyes as well, met Taleene’s gaze, and uttered a single word:

“Ow.”

The Sith felt herself being lowered to the deck, and found her footing without difficulty.

“Are you all right?” She asked, then scowled slightly and restated the question. “How bad is the damage?”

Dawn’s image shrank to what it had been in her last year of life; a slender girl about eighteen centimeters shorter than Taleene herself.

“I feel like somebody slapped me. _Hard_.” Her eyes went vacant for a long moment, then snapped back into focus. “Um. Okay, it’s no big deal, really. They bloodied my lip, but didn’t knock out any teeth.” She stopped, grinned madly, and began to dance all around the older girl. “Oh, and by the way-- _I’M A SPACESHIP! I’M A HUMONGOUS SPACESHIP!_ “

Taleene rolled her eyes, but waited patiently for the fit to pass. A quick perusal of the empty, echoing space showed that the control stations of the duplicate bridge were continuing to wake, one by one; proof that Dawn’s influence was continuing to spread through the ship’s systems.

“Dawn.” Her sister’s holographic avatar continued to dance through the room, feet kicking and hair flying. “Dawn.” She was singing too, and the sound was audible not only through the room’s speaker system, but through Taleene’s cybernetic comm implant. “ _Dawn!_ ”

The girl froze in place, flickered, vanished, and reappeared directly in front of where Taleene stood.

“Ooops. Sorry, got carried away there.” She was still grinning ear-to-ear, and bouncing in place like the child she would forever be.

“Can you _please_ show me the damage?” The Sith asked with exaggerated politeness. In point of fact, the AI programming prevented the girl from disobeying a direct order, but there was no need to rub that in her face unless there was no other choice.

“Okay, fine--here.” A hologram of the ship formed in the air between them, then grew to the size of a wave-rider’s board. Two areas on the lower hull were highlighted in red, neither of them larger than the palms of Taleenes rather small hands. “See? Localized shield failure. They were still really mushy when those things came in, you know? So they actually went _through_ the outer shields, then blew up when they hit the secondary ones.” The affected areas swelled until they filled the entire field of view. “The tertiary layer would have held, except the outer layer contained some of the explosion; it was like if you dropped a little firepopper into a bottle, then stuffed a cork into it before it went off.” The hologram showed the detonations in slow motion; how most of their energy had blown outwards, through the outer shield, but in both instances the inner shield had failed at the last instant, allowing a lance of fire several hundred meters across to blast inwards and smash into bare hull. “Don’t worry, Buffy; that armor is twenty meters thick. Those spots got burned and slagged pretty bad, but they held, and hardly anything got very broken.” 

Taleene regarded her sister with a certain degree of puzzlement.

“For an eleven-year-old, you suddenly know your way around Star Destroyers pretty well.” Dawn just shrugged.

“It’s not that complicated. Besides, I’m reading up on it while I’m talking to you. This system doesn’t have any limiters on my clock speed, like the playworld did.” She closed one eye and peered at Taleene through the other. “Annnd, yep: you just stood there like a statue while I spent a month studying up on hyperdrives and maintenance cycles.”

Her smug tone pulled an involuntary sigh of resignation from Taleene. It was hard, maintaining the cool and aloof demeanor expected of a Sith Lord when your bratty little sister was being her bratty little self.

“Fine, yes, enjoy that.” She gave Dawn’s image a level, serious look. “First question: can you repair the damage?”

The translucent girl nodded enthusiastically.

“Oh, sure! The ship is brand new, we’ve got zillions of spares on board for the most breakable things, and there’s fabricators and nanoforges that can make anything else! I can even land remotes on asteroids or moons and mine my own metal and stuff if I want. And once it’s made, there’s a few thousand repair droids I can have work on whatever’s broken.”

Taleene nodded, relaxing slightly.

“Second question: Can you keep whoever fired those missiles from hitting us with more of them?”

Dawn sobered, looked thoughtful, then nodded slowly.

“Absolutely, Buffy. The only reason those got through is because the shields were down and we didn’t have any crews manning the guns. Point-defense is mostly computer-controlled anyway, it just needs people in the loop because it was designed that way.” A row of consoles on the far side of the bridge flickered emerald, and the girl nodded once more. “I’ve got it now, no problem. And those things, even if they _were_ super-nasty, were _slow_. Even if they start throwing them at us a hundred at a time, I’ll still knock them all down before they get within a thousand kilometers of me.”

Taleene gestured at the hologram of the battledamage, and Dawn obediently shrank it down until the entire ship could be displayed, then further still, till _Executor_ was a tiny sliver, and the curve of the nameless planet swelled beneath it.

“Last question: Do you have a track on where those weapons originated?”

Dawn tilted her head, considering, and the visual record of the last few hours’ passive scans replayed themselves. A double line curved gracefully around the far side of the night-shrouded world, then back around and down to a spot on the landmass below them.

“Right there,” Dawn said, helpfully pointing it out with her finger.

Taleene eyed that spot coldly, then cocked an eyebrow at her sister, the adorable little Super-Dreadnaught.

“Those are the people who slapped you, Dawnie. Would you like to hit them back?”

Dawn’s eyes went round as saucers, and her ‘ _Squeeee_ ’ of joy was probably audible ten decks away.

  
* * * * *  


Pretty much everybody was on a phone, except Jack, Teal’c, and Daniel. Samuels was on the phone, trying to explain his failure to his bosses at the Pentagon. Hammond was on the phone, explaining the situation to the President (with frequent parenthetical asides detailing why they couldn’t simply dial the Stargate and start inserting assault teams directly onto the alien ship). And Carter was on the phone, talking with a buddy at SETI about transmitting a message of some kind to their enigmatic visitors; something along the lines of ‘Whoops, our bad, sorry about that... want to be friends?’

“--Spectrographic analysis is showing traces of metals in the bloom around the ship,” One of Samuels’ techs was saying into his headset. He nodded, and looked to his superior. “Colonel Samuels? Sir, we’re seeing evidence of damage to the enemy craft. At least some of the hull material seems to have boiled off in the fireballs. Vandenberg is asking if you want to continue the engagement with standard warheads.”

Samuels held up a hand for silence, and explained the situation to the person on the other end of his call.

“No, sir; we don’t have additional naquadah-enhanced warheads. Yes sir, we do have four more of the advanced Pegasus upper-stages, which would let us reach the vessel with additional, standard warheads. Well, sir, obviously not, but we might think about using a MIRV configuration to leverage what firepower we--”

“ _Sir!_ ” 

The strained shout cut through the room, drawing every eye to the technician who was pointing at the screen.

Carter dropped her phone’s handset in mid-word, and lunged for her laptop. O’Neill, watching as lines were traced between the hovering ship and the coast of California, over and over again, felt his blood turn to ice.

“Captain?” He asked softly, looking at Carter. “Is that what it looks like?”

She nodded, face white with shock.

“Yes sir, it is. Weapons’ fire.” Numbly, her hands moving with unaccustomed slowness, she called up more data. “The target appears to be.... It’s Vandenberg, sir.” 

One of the techs looked back and forth between Samuels, O’Neill and Hammond, seemingly unable to decide who to address.

“Sirs, I was speaking to the Range Control Officer at Vandenberg just now, but I’ve lost contact and can’t get him back.”

That prompted a flurry of activity, and Jack looked back down at Carter.

“What are we looking at here? Energy weapons?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t think so. They’re registering as solid... and the radiation emissions from them are off the scale for this equipment. I think they’re some sort of missile, sir, but for them to be crossing the intervening distance like that, in just seconds, their acceleration must be incredible; tens of thousands of G’s at least.”

The viewscreen flickered, then steadied, and they were looking at a satellite view of Southern California. The image jumped forward, and they could see individual hills, valleys, and the blue waters of the Pacific along the left of the frame.

In the center of the image, rapid-fire lances of white light were slamming into an incredibly violent eruption of some kind, a seething cauldron of destruction that that covered nearly twenty square miles. The missiles were coming down in groups of six, the salvos so closely-spaced that the glowing trails left by one group didn't have time to fade before the next group arrived, resulting in something that looked like a broad, pulsing beam. The erupting pillar of dust and debris was growing higher and wider as they watched, the airborne material rippling continually in intricately overlapping circular patterns from the intersecting shockwaves of successive impacts. 

“My God....”

Jack didn’t know who had whispered that, but he certainly shared the sentiment.

Carter, ever the analytical scientist, was examining the satellite feed through various electronic filters and enhancements.

“They’re kinetic weapons; no warhead needed, not when they have that much velocity at impact. And they’re small; probably less than ten feet long.”

Daniel looked like he was about to vomit.

“It’s like an atom bomb explosion that doesn’t end.”

Carter nodded.

“It‘s pretty much _exactly_ that; I’d say we’re seeing around seventy kilotons per second in terms of energy release. By this time...” She trailed off. Jack looked at Hammond.

“How many stationed at Vandenberg?”

The General’s expression was full of weary pain.

“Six thousand.”

Just then, as quickly as it had begun, the bombardment stopped. It made no difference. The fifty three seconds of enemy fire had leveled the entire area, and then proceeded to chew deep into the underlying bedrock. The plume of powdered earth and rock was reaching for the upper atmosphere and also drifting eastward, reminding O’Neill of the ash cloud from a volcanic eruption he’d once seen.

The mood in the room was thick with sorrow, and more than a little fear, so of course Samuels chose that moment to speak up.

“General Hammond.” He faced the older man, his face carefully composed. “I don’t think I or my people can do any more good here.” He paused, licked his lips nervously, then continued. “Request permission to evacuate to the Alpha Site.” The man then had the gall to actually give Hammond a smile, albeit a faint and nervous one. “I imagine the base there could use someone to help organize their defenses. My experience in dealing with this enemy will, I think, be invaluable in future....”

He trailed off when the icy intensity of Hammond’s glare finally penetrated. Without a word, the General turned away, joined the members of SG:1 where the stood near the observation windows, and regarded each of them in turn.

“Well, people, I am open to suggestions.”

  
* * * * *  


Standing with her arms crossed, Taleene surveyed the view in the holosphere with cold satisfaction. Looking down at Dawn’s image beside her, she nodded once.

“Well done.”

The girl bounced up and down, grinning.

“ _PewPewPew!_ ” She looked like she wanted to start dancing again, and Taleene smiled faintly; this was all just a game for the girl, after all; another playworld designed to entertain her with new and exciting adventures, and filled with basically harmless villains and monsters to be slain. 

“Did you see that?” Dawn went on, pointing excitedly at the holo. “Those Hyper-Velocity Weapon thingies are so _cool!_ And that was just six tubes; I’ve got three _hundred!_ ” She froze for an instant, then bounced even higher. “Oooooooh! I wanna try the Hellbores!” Her voice went pleading. “Please, please can I use the Hellbores on something? _Pleeeeeeeeeeease?_ ”

Taleene shook her head.

“Later. For now just keep an eye out for anything else they try to send our way.”

Dawn nodded happily, and followed along as the Sith strode towards the doors. They slid aside before she reached them, and the sisters headed towards the nearest bank of lifts. As they walked, Dawn suddenly spoke up again.

“I don’t like ‘ _Executor_ ’. For a name, I mean. I want to change it.”

Taleene glanced at her.

“Oh?”

“Yes. I wanna be called... _Aurora_.”

Taleene gave a non-committal shrug.

“Names are important. People should be called by the names they like most.”

Dawn nodded eagerly.

“Exactly!” A long pause followed, as they reached the lift nexus. “So... can I be _Aurora_?”

The older girl stopped, turned, and stared steadily at her sister. A full minute passed, with Dawn looking uncomfortable, and growing more and more fidgety beneath that frigid grey stare. Finally, with profound reluctance, she dropped her head and sighed.

“May I please be called _Aurora_... Taleene?”

Taleene smirked, pleased by the tiny victory.

“Of course you may. I like _Aurora_. It’s a pretty name.”

She moved to the lift, and when the doors swished aside she stepped in and touched the control panel. Dawn stayed outside, pouting at her fiercely.

“You know, sometimes you’re sort of mean.”

Taleene nodded in acknowledgement.

“I know.”

The doors slid closed.

  
* * * * *

 


	3. Broken

  
[ ](http://postimage.org/)  


“The last of the Outriders have undocked, Taleene,” Dawn’s voice told her. “They’re powered up and heading towards the outer system.”

The Sith nodded, her eyes on her reflection in the holo-mirror as she combed out her hair. The brilliant silver-white mane was back in order, spilling over her shoulders and down her back in a silken torrent.

“Good. Once they’re in position put them in stealth mode; passive sensors only. If anything enters the system, I want to know about it immediately.”

The _Aurora_ carried an array of small support craft, from TIE fighters to assault shuttles to spacegoing barges able to land massive armored fighting vehicles on a planet in support of a ground assault. By far the largest of her auxiliaries, however, were her Outriders. Eight _Vigil_ -class Corvettes, 250-meter-long vessels outfitted with extensive sensor suites, carried externally in racks tucked in beneath the ‘wings‘ of _Aurora‘s_ arrowhead shape. One of their prime functions in the Imperial Navy was to patrol the remote reaches of star systems, watching for ships trying to slip in or out of settled regions without being noticed. Here, with the situation so uncertain, Taleene had decided to send them out on remote, to keep watch, in case an enemy force tried to take her by surprise. It had taken only a few minutes per ship for her to configure the relatively simple control systems of the small warships, and allow Dawn remote access. After that, the weary Sith had returned to her personal quarters for a brief rest, while the cybernetic ghost of her sister prepped the ships for launch.

The twenty minute pause was perhaps ill-advised, but she’d needed a chance to catch her breath after that endless race through the bowels of the ship. Plugging her armor into the extremely capable diagnostics module in her quarters had shown no damage or malfunctions, and as far as the medical unit’s sensors could tell, no significant injuries to the body beneath it. She’d obediently gulped down the pouch of liquid it provided, ignoring the slightly metallic taste of salts and electrolytes. Although she longed to take the armor off so that the autodoc could treat her many bruises, she couldn’t take the time for that; not yet.

_Though a minute or two to satisfy my vanity shouldn’t do any harm, I suppose_ , She thought to herself, with a wintery smile for the girl in the mirror. The sweat and smudges of her exertions had been dealt with, leaving only the cold and haughty perfection for which she was known throughout the Empire. She knew it was foolish to bother with such things when there was no longer a crew to impress, but it simply wasn’t in her to allow a disheveled appearance to remain for a minute longer than was necessary.

“I wanna shoot something.” Dawn’s voice held a petulant note. “That moon’s right _there_ ; can I try out the HellRails? According to the specs they have plenty of range, and a few shots should be enough to blow a _mountain_ right off the--”

“No.” Taleene left the bathroom and walked down the short hall. When it opened out into her quarters, she turned right and headed towards the central tower, barely noticing the splendor around her.

The quarters set aside for a Fleet Admiral, such as would be quartered here, were, to say the least, palatial. Each chamber was huge, with high, arching ceilings that wouldn’t be out of place in a cathedral. Bare metal was nowhere to be found; instead polished stone, frosted glass, or darkly gleaming wood panels covered every surface. Soft, sourceless lighting filled every space, revealing room after room of luxurious furnishings, beautiful artwork, and tastefully-designed bits of technology. When she exited those chambers, she crossed a graceful walkway that connected two structures, halfway up a wide atrium that was a full seven decks high. The air there was stirred by cool breezes, and was lightly scented with the perfume of green and growing things. Below her she saw several thousand square meters of grass, flowers, and small, carefully-maintained trees, bordered by smooth paths and ornate patios. The sound of water came from some distance to her left, where a small waterfall spilled over a lip of stone and tumbled twenty meters into a large ornamental pool. With a brief, appreciative glance up at the holographic projections of a blue sky rapidly being overcome by oncoming storm clouds, Taleene entered the central tower and proceeded down the corridor.

This entire complex, which in total was larger than the headquarters of some regional planetary governments, was completely isolated from the rest of _Aurora’s_ interior. Armored bulkheads five meters thick surrounded it on every side, with the only access provided by two portals that were guarded by computer-controlled weaponry. This was her refuge, in a universe filled with beings who craved her destruction--even before the accident which had befallen the ship, no droid, and no human being was allowed entrance, save by her express command. She could even shed her armor here, and walk about like a normal person, so long as she didn’t exert herself overmuch, and wore the technology-laced jewelry which assisted her nervous system and dispensed her medicines. 

Not that there was time for that now, not when she was still feeling that vague pressure, the Force disturbance that had been insistently prodding her ever since the immediate threat of the missiles had passed.

“Dawn?”

The girl’s voice, when it came, was sullen.

“What?”

Taleene walked past briefing rooms, communications centers, and holographic map chambers where the conquest and subjugation of entire sectors could be planned and orchestrated, all empty and dark.

“I know you like having weapons to play with,” She told her little sister. “But even a warship needs to be able to do more than just shoot things. There’s only the two of us here, in this place. Out of the whole Empire, just us.” She reached the lift shaft, and stepped into the waiting pod. The doors slid shut and she felt herself rising upwards. “There’s no way I can do this without you. Will you try and be good, and help me find out where we are, and how to get home?”

The pause that followed felt somehow ashamed, and she wondered if somehow she was getting Force impressions from the ship itself, now that Dawn’s essence was inhabiting it.

“I’m sorry, Buff--I mean, Taleene; I’ll do my best to help you, absolutely.”

The Sith smiled.

“Thank you. I know you will; and you’re doing very well so far.” The lift doors opened, and she stepped out into a space that was unique abord the ship. Looking up, she nodded in satisfaction. “We’re almost there, I see.”

“Yep! Coming down to the one-thousand kilometer mark in twenty seconds. I rolled onto my side relative to the planet because of the deflector damage on my belly; repairs on that are getting started now.”

The planet’s nightside face dominated her view as Dawn brought the ship lower, to an altitude of just a thousand kilometers, the magnificent vista possible only because of where Taleene now stood.

Back during the design phase of the _Executor_ class, the naval architects had planned to include a dedicated docking bay for shuttles and other small craft, so as to facilitate the travel of command personnel between their ships and the Flag Admiral’s offices. Eventually that idea was dropped, but not before the space had already been allocated and locked into the final design. That left an odd, unfinished void at the top of one particular section of the ship’s superstructure, and when Lady Taleene had been given the ship, she used her considerable authority to push through some last-minute modifications.

Now, the tower above her quarters was topped by a forty-meter dome of transparasteel, the material so close to perfectly clear that the many-faceted bubble was effectively invisible. Looking up at the blaze of stars overhead, and the easily-visible lights of cities scattered across the planet, Taleene addressed the air once more.

“Have you been able to decipher their broadcasts yet?”

“Yes; once I turned the number crunchers in the comp net loose on them, they figured it out really fast. I don’t think these people are even _trying_ to encrypt most of it.”

“Hmm.” She walked the center of the circular space, where eight tall, metallic plinths surrounded a nest of retractable screens and controls, which in turn surrounded a low, cushioned platform. Some Sith, she knew, preferred to lock themselves into tiny, claustrophobic pods to meditate, in order to better focus their sight and energies inward. As for herself, she preferred a secure, but open space for her meditations, with the stars shining down on her in all their silent majesty. 

“Show me,” She said, settling herself on the soft platform and folding her feet beneath her. Bare feet would have been more comfortable, but she had long since grown accustomed to her armor and spike-heeled boots. When the screens began streaming intercepted images for her, she regarded them impassively for several minutes before speaking once more. “Humans. Well, that’s a pleasant surprise.” The Empire was firmly biased in favor of Humankind; a prejudice which she shared. For as long as she could remember, she’d felt distaste, even aggression, towards anything that appeared monstrous or alien. “Have they tried to communicate with us?”

Dawn made an exasperated sound.

“I don’t know for sure. There’s thousands of broadcasts, from all over, and they’re all about different things--some of them _really_ silly-looking. The only thing that I think is aimed at us on purpose is the radar that’s painting me; thirteen different sources--oops, make that fourteen, another one just came online.”

Taleene touched a control, studied the graphic that came up on a display screen, and nodded.

“They can see us, but either they don’t have energy weapons that can reach us, or they’re afraid to use them.” She waved a hand, and the various displays began folding themselves neatly away. “Keep the shields up at maximum, and watch for any more missiles.”

“Um, no kidding? I’m _not_ a baby!”

Taleene smiled.

“I never said you were; I just need you to keep watch for me while I do something.” Turning her head slightly, she addressed the local computer node. “Gravity control: Gravity to zero.” Her weight dropped quickly to nothing, her hair spreading in a soft halo behind and around her head. Wrapping herself lightly in a telekinetic cocoon, she drifted upwards.

[ _There’s a lot of stuff whizzing around down here,_ ] Dawn said, switching to the cybernetic comm link as Taleene moved away from the speakers below. [ _Not even counting the aircraft way down in the atmosphere, there's a couple thousand of these little platforms in orbit; low-rate microwave and radio transmitters, lots of observation units looking at the planet with cameras and radar, and some of them that don't really look like they're doing much of anything._ ] She paused for a few moments, then continued. [ _The Outriders are telling me that they're picking up a handful of really weak signals from a few other places in the system; the ones they can localize are coming from the most pathetic probe droids_ ever.]

Taleene considered that as she used her power to bring herself to a stop in the exact center of the dome.

“Do any of the satellites look like weapons platforms? Are you seeing targeting sensors, weapons, or shields?”

[ _Nothing up here right now has any of that as far as I can tell. More than half of them aren’t even alive; they’re drifting. No attitude control, no power emissions, messed-up orbits._ ]

The Sith shook her head and closed her eyes, dismissing all of that as unneeded distraction. 

“All right then, keep an eye on them and hush now. I have to concentrate.”

Again, she could almost feel the ship’s sensors scrutinizing her, now that a sentient mind was behind them.

[ _What are you going to do?_ ] The girl asked, her innocent curiosity coming through clearly even on the cybercom. Taleene sighed, opened her eyes, and peered down at an optical pickup near her console down below.

“Somewhere below us is an incredibly powerful concentration of energy; Dark Side energy. I want to see if I can learn more about it, see if it’s connected to whatever brought us here. Now shush.”

Closing her eyes once more she relaxed her body, let her arms float out to either side, and her head tilt back slightly. Ordering her thoughts, tapping the strength of her anger and determination, she narrowed her mind to a tight, powerful focus, and _reached_.

* * * * *

_“How old?!”_

_Xander gave a tentative sort of half shrug._

_“I don’t know... maybe forty-five?”_

“What?!”

_He winced at her tone--and the volume._

_“Well, it’s not really spelled out in the movies. Anakin was probably in his early twenties when his wife had Luke and Leia, and then Luke was probably around twenty in the first film. So maybe not quite forty-five.”_

_Buffy shook her head firmly._

_“No. No_ way _am I dressing up as someone who’s as old as my_ mother!” __

_Xander looked at her pleadingly--to no avail. The Slayer had her own version of Willow’s famous ‘resolve face’, and she was showing it to him now. With a defeated sigh, he held up his hands in surrender._

_“Okay, okay, fine. How old would be okay--and by the way, remember that this is the make-believe age of the fictional character who you’re dressing as, not something which has any impact at all on the really-real world where all of us live.”_

_The beautiful blonde girl gave a little ‘hmph’._

_“It’s the principle of the thing. And evil me is the exact same age as good me.”_

_Xander squinted at her in disbelief._

_“What?”_

_“You heard me. She’s sixteen. And three-quarters.”_

_The fanboy in Xander was writhing in torment, but that fanboy wasn’t the part of him that could conceivably get bounced off the ceiling if Buffy didn’t get her way. Even so...._

_“Buff, that wrecks the whole timeline--_ massively _. Vader going all Dark-Sidey is part of what kicks off the fall of the Republic and lets the Emperor get rid of the Jedi. How can Luke and Leia even--”_

 _“She has an older brother or something, and they’re his.” Buffy glanced around the cemetery they were patrolling, put her hand on his chest to make him stop where he was, then slipped into the bushes, even as she pulled a stake from inside her jacket. “They’re her niece and nephew, and she’s the really young, really evil, and really_ cute _aunt that everybody told stories about during Thanksgiving dinner.”_

_A brief scuffle took place, blows landing with audible force, a couple of pained grunts, some shaking of foliage, and finally the unique -pampf- sound a vamp made when it exploded into dust. Buffy stepped back into view, brushing at her slightly mussed hair. Xander nodded in acknowledgment of her general awesomeness, but voiced his objection nonetheless._

_“The Emperor made a sixteen-year old girl a Sith Lord? He put her in charge of a battle fleet?”_

_Something in his tone must have told her that she’d already won, because she gave him a one-armed hug by way of consolation._

_“Yes, Xander, he did. Want to know why?” He looked over and down at her, and she beamed up at him with that look--the look that was equal parts innocence, glee, and smug satisfaction--that beautiful girls got when they knew they were going to get their way. “Because she is Just. That. Good.”_

* * * * *

So much for a quiet Halloween evening.

Giles looked again at the yawning abyss in the center of the Library; a seething, multi-dimensional void which blazed with energies that managed to be eye-searingly bright, despite being all but invisible to the human eye. The massive, soundless explosion which had heralded the mystical rupture had erupted up through the floor, and blown out the skylights for good measure, while still leaving most of the Library relatively intact.

It had also narrowly missed killing Giles himself, who had been perusing the card catalog quite close by... which made him very glad he hadn't been sorting returned books on the large table instead. Now, though, he was at a loss. It had been almost two hours since the event, and even though nothing tangible had emerged from the portal, he had no idea how to go about closing it. Every magical tool he’d dared direct against the thing had instantaneously vaporized in violent and colorful ways--he imagined that over on the magical plane it would look like one of those ‘blow outs’ that sometimes happened in desert oilfields, with burning oil and gas erupting endlessly from the ground with the speed and force of an enormous and uncontrolled rocket exhaust.

He was waiting for Buffy and the others to return from their trick or treating, though he was honest enough to acknowledge that he didn’t know what he expected the Slayer to do about such a thing.

“ _Mwrrrrow_ Giles! Giles where _mrrrowow are_ you _rrrrwowrrr_!?”

It took him a moment to decipher the words, mixed as they were with that anxious, plaintive caterwauling, but when he edged around the painfully shimmering void and looked to the entrance, he understood.

At least, after a fashion.

“Cordelia? Is that you?”

She glared at him, eyes full of impatience and fear in equal measure.

“Of course it’s me, _mwrrrrooow!_ ” She shook her head angrily, the furry, triangular ears atop her head lying briefly flat in annoyance. Her long tail lashed back and forth a few times, and the vertical slits of her pupils narrowed. Giles stared; on top of the rest, this was entirely too random and strange to be easily processed.

“And... you’re a... _cat?_ ”

“ _Duh!_ ” She snarled at him--literally snarled, while showing small fangs that were narrower and sharper-looking that those of a vampire. “And the _rrrrrwrres_ monster _rrrrrs_ and weir _rrrr_ d things everywhere _rrrrrrrr_ e!"

She made her way over the piles of debris with an amazing display of grace and agility, and he saw that both her hands and her bare feet now posessed slender retractile claws to help her along--and of course her tail was there for counterbalance.

His mind finally broke free of its shocked immobility and began functioning once more. 

“Monsters and weird things?” He looked at the open rift; he’d been here the whole time, he _knew_ that nothing physical had traversed it.

“Yes! The whole to _oooow_ n is full of little monste _rrrrrrrr_ s!” Catdelia was prowling back and forth, her tail thrashing restlessly. “You have to fix me, Giles! I can’t stay like this!”

He nodded absently, largely ignoring her as he considered the problem.

“When I saw you earlier, just after school, you were dressed as a feline, I believe? A ‘Catgirl’?”

She nodded angrily, her claws flexing in and out.

“Stupid Devon and his anime gi _rrrrrrr_ l fetish! And do _I_ get to have him dress up as _my_ fantasy? _Nooo,_ all I get is a big dumb doofus with a dog mask, a dog collar, and dog _breath_!”

Giles felt his eyes widen.

“Good lord. Your friend--he actually _became_ a canine?”

She snarled again, softly.

“Of course not; it’s always the _girrrrrrl_ who gets objectified, it’s the gi _rrrrrrrrrl_ who has to get all dressed up, and do her hair, and her makeup, while the guys just throw on jeans and a t-shirt and think they’re so cool--”

“Wait. Devon _didn’t_ transform... but others did.” She nodded absently, suddenly distracted by what seemed in irresistible need to lick her paw--er, her _hand_ over and over again. Giles turned this fresh information over in his mind for a few moments, then looked at her sharply.

“Cordelia.” She ignored him, fiercely intent on her grooming. “ _Cordelia!_ ”

She looked at him curiously.

“What?”

He took a deep breath for calm, and spoke very carefully.

“Where did you get your costume?”

* * * * *

Leia didn’t know what exactly was chasing her, she just knew that it was tireless, terrifying, and very, very determined to catch her. She picked a storefront at random, pushing through the door to discover a pair of dead men lying at the feet of a third. Apparently they’d killed each other; no doubt as a result of the early stages of Rakghoul madness. Two of them were clutching chrome pistols of some kind, and she knelt carefully to retrieve them, having lost her sword earlier. It was difficult; she had to pry the weapons from their cold, dead hands, but eventually she wrestled them loose from the corpses.

Not a moment too soon, as she heard a heavy tread from the door; the maddeningly deliberate and unhurried footsteps that had become all too familiar. Rising to her feet she backed away from the figure that filled the doorway, machete in hand and white mask staring blankly.

In recent years Leia had amassed far too much experience with all manner of firearms, and she managed to keep hold of the pistols as she fired them, despite their brutal recoil and her slender wrists and hands. The slugs they fired tore into her pursuer as he raised his own weapon, creating wet, bloody spatters where they struck, and causing him to stagger and pause. She continued to fire both weapons as she backed away, and kept firing until their limited ammunition ran dry.

The human--no, the _thing_ in the mask straightened up, regarded her impassively, and then strode forward once more, every step deliberate and unhurried.

Leia flung the pistols away as she dove behind the counter, scrambled through the short hallway that led to the rear of the shop, and fervently thanked whatever random chance had provided her with a rear exit. Bursting through the door, she hurried left down a stinking alley, her bare feet stinging with every step.

* * * * *

Dawn was bored.

Buffy was floating there, not talking, not moving, hardly even breathing, and nothing much else was happening. Her main concern, of course, was keeping an eye on the _Aurora’s_ immediate vicinity, but nothing much was happening there, either. The humans on the ground were pinging her with lots of very loud radar pulses, and that was pretty annoying, but it wasn’t something she could do anything about unless Taleene gave the order. The Outriders were settling into their positions out where the system’s gas giants lived, and some of what they were sending back to her via the FTL datalinks was interesting... only she didn’t dare devote too much of her attention to it. AI or not, Dawn’s capacity was sharply limited; after all, she had never been designed to do _any_ of this. The molecular circuitry of her core was there to give her human mind a place to live, and it did that very well. Splitting herself into multiple instances that each had undiminished speed and cognitive ability, the capacity for true multi-tasking like a dedicated military system, was something she could manage only imperfectly, and within very tight constraints that were dictated by the fundamental architecture of her own ’brain’. So, although she could do a lot, she was far from being any kind of technological goddess... which was really too bad.

She checked on the work currently taking place in her innards, where the ventral deflector arrays had suffered overload. Several kilometers of superconducting cables had explosively vaporized when those monster warheads detonated, and a total of seventy-three tertiary sub-nodes had been damaged when the overload made various other bits melt, explode, or both. That was an impressive cubage of machinery and electronics that needed repair, even if it was microscopic in relation to her total bulk. There were currently one thousand, four hundred and five repair droids at work in her engineering spaces, cutting damaged components free, refurbishing the damaged mounts and structural elements, and preparing to begin work replacing or repairing the damaged systems. That part at least wasn’t something she had to think about; the droids were on board to do exactly this task, and didn’t need her to tell them their business.

Idly flipping through the hundreds of thousands of sensor feeds that let her experience the inside of the ship, she found herself on the bridge. The body was still there; the dead man she’d noticed earlier, while Buffy was busy making herself pretty again. Running the logs back showed her how he had died, and it was pretty clear from watching it that her sister wasn’t exactly fond of poor Captain Piett. With a mental shrug she detailed a cleanup droid to come and collect the corpse. There were disposal facilities that would break him down to manageable-sized bits and vaporize those in one of the heat plumes from the fusion plants, so she told the machine to go and take care of it. While she was ’on’ the bridge she noticed that some of the consoles were also damaged, so more droids were assigned to take care of that. 

Flipping back to the meditation chamber, she looked again at Buffy, floating there, motionless. 

She turned down her receivers, which continued to relay the constant pinging of the ground radars, which was now coming from seventeen separate locations. And then one of _Aurora’s_ proximity detectors tripped, and Dawn’s attention shifted to a tiny bit of metal and silica that was hurtling towards her. 

It wasn’t a threat, not really. Her sensors could see that it was some sort of communications relay; a fragile little thing that massed only a few tons. It was tumbling helplessly, in a slowly decaying orbit that would drop it into the planet’s atmosphere in another fifty years or so. Harmless... and headed straight for her. Floating in the virtual space which held her control interface with the _Aurora_ , Dawn’s cybernetic ghost giggled and clapped her hands.

* * * * *

The hull of the titanic warship was liberally dotted with weapon installations; hundreds of Hellbore turrets as big as medium-sized buildings, dense clusters of HVW missile ports, ion cannon and laser battery emplacements, long rows of heavy missile tubes and the truly immense structures of the anti-ship Hellrail fusion cannons.

And there were also more than two _thousand_ structures which were far smaller; the twin-barreled turbolasers that were her primary point-defense weapon. She also had an inner layer of active protection: thousands of quad-mount blaster cannon that could destroy enemy fighters and shuttles even at point-blank range, but for anything between five and ten thousand kilometers, the turbolasers were her weapon of choice.  
With a beam thickness of only twenty centimeters, they weren't powerful enough to seriously damage even the smallest capital ship, but everything else within their range was fair game... and they were accurate enough to track and kill even the nimblest starfighter or missile in mid-flight.

Now, in the utter silence of space, on the furthest tip of _Aurora’s_ ‘nose’, a single one of _Aurora's_ twenty-five hundred turrets popped up from its protective emplacement, the stubby dual barrels pivoting to the appropriate angle and elevation in less than an eyeblink. A millisecond later, twin beams of searing emerald lanced out into the darkness.

* * * * *

“--Still maintaining position over California, at an altitude of about six hundred miles. No, Mr. President, still no attempt at communication from them, and my people are still trying to determine why the ship has moved lower.” Hammond listened to his civilian superior for a moment than shook his head as he spoke into the handset once more. “No sir, I wouldn’t advise relocating to Air Force One. Even if they intend to attack more ground targets, you’re still less of a target in the bunker than you would be in an aircraft. Yes. Yes, my people did try to--”

“General!”

He looked at Captain Carter, who was typing commands into her console with careful haste. The large display was showing orbital data for something, and a series of data strings made his expression turn even more grim.

“I’ll have to get back to you, Mr. President.” Setting the phone down, he moved to Carter’s side. “Captain?”

She looked up at him.

“More weapons’ fire, Sir.” Seeing his look, she hastened to clarify. “Not at a ground target, thankfully. It was a satellite.” The screen flickered, then shifted to show a diagram of a blunt cylinder. “The INSAT-3DT; it’s a communications satellite launched in nineteen-eighty two. It’s been dead for years, and drifting. Orbital data shows that it was on a collision course for the alien ship.”

He nodded in understanding.

“So they destroyed it.”

“Yes, Sir. Some kind of very intense laser--it disintegrated the satellite instantly, at a range of about nine hundred kilometers.”

Hammond nodded again.

“Well, destroying a piece of space junk that was going to hit them is understandable. I don’t think that’s a hostile act by anyone’s definition.”

“No, Sir. But it does make me wonder why they didn’t use the same weapon to destroy the missiles we sent at them earlier.” She gestured at the display showing the ship, and the distance at which it had destroyed the satellite. “If they can knock down incoming objects that easily, why let us detonate nuclear weapons right on top of them?”

He didn’t have a good answer, just one that illustrated how much trouble they were in.

“It may be, Colonel, that their thought processes are very different from ours. Maybe they’re beyond our ability to ever understand.”

She frowned, clearly unhappy with that, but before she could answer her console buzzed loudly. He watched as she interrogated the system, then another series of lines and text blocks came up on the screen.

“They’re firing again, Sir. More satellites.” Hammond felt his eyebrows move together slightly as he watched the data form. A minute passed, and Carter, too, grew visibly confused. “They’re....” She shook her head. “I don’t know _what_ they’re doing, Sir. The aliens are destroying satellites as their orbits bring them within line-of-sight, but they’re not destroying _all_ of the satellites they can see, and not all of the ones they _are_ destroying are of the same type, either.” She consulted a rapidly growing list of identification codes. “Some of them are dead, some of them are functional; some of them are civilian, some are military.” She ran a had back through her short hair, looking a little lost. “As far as I can tell, this is completely random.”

He didn’t have any comforting thoughts for her, just a reprise of his earlier comment.

“Alien beyond our understanding; God help us.” He said softly, and shook his head in recognition of what that might mean for Humanity.

* * * * *

“That one.”

A roundish object vaporized.

“And that one.”

A squat cylinder this time, with two stubby wings made of solar panels. The panels glittered nicely as the point-defense lasers shredded them.

“Oooh, not that one; that one’s pretty.”

It was a hexagonal cylinder, with six matching panels spreading from one end like some oddly-geometric flower. She let that one pass, admiring it along the way, then turned her attention to the next.

Dawn’s virtual space was swarming with glowing icons, now that she was devoting her full attention to the satellites; the planet’s lower orbital regions were a crowded place, and she'd activated several more of her turrets to deal with the abundance of targets. She floated there, shifting her attention to each one in turn, passing judgment on what she saw when her sensors brought it close.

“Nope.”

A soundless explosion.

“Ugh, with all those antennae it looks like a spine-fish!”

A violent flash.

“Hmm....” She regarded a relatively close one. It was tumbling end over end, and one solar panel ‘wing’ was bent and broken. It reminded her of an injured bird she’d once seen, on the ledge outside her hospital window. The poor creature had flown into the building and hurt itself, and afterwards had been too injured to fly. It had lingered there for over a day, unable to leave its high perch, but doomed to starve if it stayed. She hadn’t seen what happened to it, it was simply gone when she woke up from a fitful sleep. It made her sad to think of that, and ghost-Dawn reached out an insubstantial hand and touched the glowing representation of the spaceborne object.

Out on the hull, a complex thing that was _not_ a weapon turned, tracked, and activated.

The tumbling came to a gentle stop as the tractor beam very carefully nudged the fragile object. When it was stable once more, and flying in a normal attitude, the beam faded, and let it fly on.

Dawn smiled sadly, then took a moment to check Buffy.

Her sister was still doing the trance thing, to all appearances oblivious to the universe. Satisfied that everything there was fine, she went back to her game.

“Sort of pretty. _Very_ pretty! Annnnnd, ugh, not at all pretty.”

She flicked her finger at the offending object, nodded as twin beams of coherent light wiped it from space, and started humming a happy little tune to herself. At this rate, she could keep herself entertained for at least another hour before she ran out of things to shoot.

* * * * *

“Jesus _Christ_ , lady! Are you tryin’ to get yourself _killed?!_ ”

Leia swallowed with difficulty, her hands raised, as the three soldiers came terrifyingly close to shredding her with their antiquated, but _very_ lethal assault rifles. 

Or rather, two of the soldiers came close to shooting her out of ingrained reflex; the third one was sagging slowly to the ground despite the efforts of his comrades to keep him on his feet, several severe wounds showing through rents in his unpowered body armor.

“Sorry, I was busy running away from something.” She lowered her hands slowly while throwing nervous glances behind her, but for now the unstoppable figure in the mask was nowhere in sight. Recent experience told her that it wouldn’t last. Looking back at the men, who reminded her strongly of the Rebellion’s own ground troops, she moved cautiously forward. “Can I help? I’ve had medical training.”

They both regarded her warily, shared a look, then shrugged at her.

“Sure, whatever you can do. Here’s a medkit.” She knelt next to the man. The nametag on his armor’s chestplate read ‘Frost’, and she gave him the most reassuring smile she could manage as she examined his injuries. Her smile, faint as it was, didn’t last long.

“What did this? There are _sticks_ in him, broken off sticks....”

The larger, louder soldier laughed harshly, the sound brittle and tinged with barely-controlled panic.

“They’re arrows, if you can believe that shit. We got jumped by some guys, hosed them down, took ‘em out no problem... and then their friends showed up.” He pushed his helmet back, and wiped at his sweaty face with one grimy hand. “They’re _elves_ ; motherfucking, daisy-eating _elves!_ ”

His companion, who as quieter, calmer, and much more competent-looking, put a hand on the man’s armored shoulder.

“Relax, Hudson. We just need to find the others, get to the evac point, and it’ll be fine--”

“Bull _shit_ it’ll be fine! Tell _Frost_ it’ll be fine! Tell those fucking _elves_ with their goddamn _bows_ it’ll be fine!”

Leia kept her head down and her mouth shut, wondering if perhaps she would be better off without these men. On the one hand, the heavily-armed soldiers were likely to be the best allies she would find amidst all this chaos. On the other hand--

She administered a large dose of anti-shock medication from the medkit, but didn’t dare give him any of the stimulant, for fear it would make him bleed out even faster. Judging from the extent of his injuries, she doubted he would last much longer no matter what she did.

“Listen: you need to get your friend to a medical center, _immediately_. Do you know where one is? Or the spaceport, if that’s closer; they would have at least a clinic there that could--”

“ _Contact!_ ” She flinched and ducked as the quiet one turned and fired, missing her head by bare centimeters. The staccato blast half-deafened her, and she threw a look over her shoulder to see what had provoked that response.

Rakghoul; scores of Rakghoul were bounding and scrambling towards them, rushing down the street and sidewalk in a grinning, snarling horde. The one called Hudson opened fire with his weapon, shouting obscenities all the while.

“Little mutant _bastards!_ Come get some! You wanna bite me, you little shit?! Okay, bite _this!_ Midget mutant monster _fucks!_ ”

Leia saw a dozen of the small creatures fall, but dozens more were coming, and the tide was sweeping towards them with horrifying speed. Snatching up Frost’s rifle, she examined the weapon with desperate speed.

_Slug-thrower, but a fairly advanced one. Fire selector here, ammunition counter here--safety off, pull it tight to the shoulder, line it up and--_

She fired, saw one of the smaller Rakghoul stumble, then keep coming. Without missing a beat she flipped the fire selector to burst fire and tried again. This time the creature fell, writhing helplessly on the ground and clutching at a ribcage that had been sawn open by whatever the gun was firing. Shifting targets with swift, practiced precision, she killed another, and another, and another.

“Very nice,” She heard Hicks say from behind her, as he directed his shots with equal speed and care.

“Thanks. I had good teachers.” 

Several of the charging mutates were clumped close together, and she heard Hicks’ weapon cough softly. An instant later, one of the close-grouped creatures exploded, the concussion making the others stumble and slow. Leia examined her rifle, found the small slide that switched to the integral grenade launcher, and followed the man’s example, firing into the closest group as they ran forward. The grenade blew the small, savage thing into two ragged halves, and she jacked the slide to chamber another round, and another, walking fire across their advance. To her right, Hudson was still spraying them wildly, his weapon on full-auto, though it promptly went dry, leaving him scrambling to reload.

The Rakghoul were slowing; the concentrated fire had dropped more than half of them, and even their plague-warped minds could see that they wouldn’t reach the humans this way. She switched back to the gun and shot them anyway; any that survived would just try to kill them again later. Three bursts later her weapon went silent. A glance at the digital display made her scowl and look over her shoulder at Hicks. “Is there any more ammunition?” He nodded to the ground next to her, his face expressionless.

“Frost has a couple of clips left. Might as well take them. Go ahead and keep his gun too... he won’t need it.”

She glanced down and saw that he was right; the man’s eyes were staring lifelessly skyward. Without a word she pulled the boxlike items from his belt, located the proper button, and popped the empty from her rifle. Slamming the fresh one home, she peered down the street. The last of the creatures that were mobile had fled, leaving only the dead and dying. She looked at Hicks, and cocked an eyebrow at the panting and wild-eyed Hudson.

“There has to be a ship around here somewhere; what say we go and find it?”

* * * * *

“Ripper; how _nice_ to see you. Sorry I didn‘t meet you at the door, but as you can see, I‘m a little caught up in my work at the moment.”

Giles regarded the man for a long moment, then eased the rest of the way into the back room of the costume shop. Cordelia, still making anxious cat noises, hung back in the doorway, peering at the tableau with wide eyes.

Ethan Rayne was hovering in mid-air, surrounded by a corona of searing, barely-visible dimensional energy identical to what was vomiting forth from the Hellmouth. The room around him was in a state of shattered disarray; a smaller cousin of the devastation that had overtaken the Library when _this_ \--whatever _this_ was--had happened. Ethan, despite his elevated position some feet above Giles, his easy words and practiced smirk, seemed less than comfortable. Giles noted how the cords in his neck were standing out, and his arms were likewise taut and straining as he hovered there.

“Problems, Ethan?” He asked, looking around for some clue as to what had happened. “Ah, a summoning ritual; some sort of archetypal deity figure?” He regarded the destruction, then lifted his gaze to the sorcerer. “I’m disappointed. Your workings were never this sloppy in the old days.”

Ethan laughed, the sound both loud and strained.

“Oh, this isn’t _my_ fault!” Giles just glared, and the other man gave him a small smile, even as the effort of speaking drew beads of sweat from his brow. “All right, it’s partly my fault, but only the smallest part of it; the rest of it, my old friend, is because of that girl of yours.”

Giles froze, then took a slow step forward towards the levitating man.

“Buffy?” He felt himself going very cold, as the worst, most violent part of him rose to the surface for the first time in a very long while. “Ethan, I warn you, if you’ve targeted her somehow with this scheme of yours--” That earned him another laugh, and when he unthinkingly took a step closer to strike the man, the merest touch of that pale, shimmering fire surrounding Ethan sent a rush of purest agony rushing down his arm.

“Careful, old man,” The sorcerer warned him. “This isn’t a gently bubbling spring I’m caught in, here.”

Giles took a step back, rubbing at his arm. The pain was fading, but even the fading echo was enough to make his eyes water.

“What about Buffy? What have you done to her?”

Ethan smirked at him, then regarded one of his hands with great interest, and Giles saw that parts of his wrist and palm, as well as two of his fingers, seemed to be dissolving slowly, transforming into that colorless fire. With an elaborate show of unconcern, the man raised his eyes to Giles’ own.

“ _Me?_ I didn’t do anything, except take advantage of the nature of this place to pull a little prank.”

“ _Prank?!_ ” Giles all but hissed in fury. “Do you know how many dead I saw on my way here? How many dead _children?_ ” Ethan just shrugged.

“Tastes differ, Ripper; besides, I don’t recall you being so squeamish, back in the day.” He glanced down, noted that his left leg was now gone from the knee down, and frowned unhappily. “Well, that’s a bother, isn’t it?” When he looked up again, his face was utterly serious. “I tell you now, I never targeted your Slayer. There was no way for me to know that she was linked to the Hellmouth. And even if I’d known, I would have thought that you would have done the working to undo the sacrifice.”

Giles stared, as confused now as he was angry.

“Linked? Sacrifice? What are you talking about?”

Ethan looked at him as if he were an especially dim Pekinese, or perhaps a Labrador.

“I’m talking about the Hellmouth, old man. I’m talking about your Slayer. Someone performed a blood ritual. Someone sacrificed a life, a very powerful life, and bound your girl to the Hellmouth.” He looked genuinely surprised at the blank stare he was getting. “What? You mean you really didn’t _know?_ ”

Giles felt himself shrinking in utter and complete horror as it hit him.

“She died. She died, when the Master drained her, and drowned her... and she was in the very _throat_ of the Hellmouth when it happened.”

Ethan nodded, ignoring the way his left leg was entirely gone now, and much of his right one was looking patchy as well.

“That would do it. So, imagine my surprise when I performed my invocation, and instead of getting a limited (though extremely clever, I assure you) warping of reality powered by the energy leaking from your Hellmouth, instead the whole _bloody_ thing blows open, and the mystical forces of a dozen hell dimensions falls on me like the Himalayas.”

Giles frowned, noting that the invisible flames were steadily eating their way through Ethan’s body. At the very most he had only minutes remaining to him.

“All that power flowed into you? Into the spell?” He found that hard to believe; as widespread and cruel as the transformations were, so much energy should have had vastly more visible effects than simply--

“No, not me, and not _the_ spell.” Ethan nodded towards the front of the shop. “Your girl. She’s the focus. I can feel her in the spell, but she’s also beyond it, both physically and mystically. All of that power, all of that energy, charged with change and creation, went to her; it couldn’t _not_ go to her--not when her blood and her life had touched the Hellmouth itself.” He grinned, even as his arms began withering down to stumps, starting at his wrists and moving upwards. “I wish I could be here to see what happens after this. Unfortunately, I’m caught in the flood--A dozen dimensions, Ripper; directly connected to the Hellmouth… and dying. Entire _worlds_ are dying for this, consumed, _burning_ , all so that whatever daydream your little girl came up with can be made real.”

Giles’ horror found a new high mark, somehow, and he balled his hands into fists as he stared into Ethan’s eyes.

“I pray you find yourself in hell, Ethan, for what you’ve done.”

The other man just smiled.

“We’ll see. I have a grip on something, somewhere, I think. Maybe a hell, maybe a heaven, maybe a world with nothing but professional telephone sanitizers. Either way, I’ll find out momentarily.” His eyes went glassy, and his features twisted in a small smirk. “Ah, here it comes. I can see further from where I’m standing. The causality lines are shifting, shortening. Something’s coming, something from your girl.” He looked down, eyes refocusing as he smiled a disconcertingly broad and evil smile. “Oh, Ripper; you’re going to _love_ this.”

* * * * *

“Dawn, what are you doing?”

A holographic image of her sister flickered into existence before her, looking postively angelic. There was even a faint pearly glow around her projected form, to strengthen the effect.

“Who, me? Nothing!”

Taleene narrowed her eyes, gaze going to where she’d glimpsed the sustained, thread-like beams of laser weapons in the far distance beyond the dome a moment earlier. Shaking her head, she dismissed the issue and moved on to more important matters. Floating down from where she’d been hovering, she waved her hand, causing the stored screens and input consoles around her platform to unfold and come alive, even as she touched lightly down among them.

“Gravity control: one gee.” As the artificial gravity ramped back up to normal, she looked at Dawn. “I’ve found what I was looking for. The nexus of Darkside energy below is incredibly powerful, and it _is_ connected to what happened to us.”

Dawn’s image bounced up and down happily.

“Okay then! Go down and wave your arms at it, and make it take us home!” She stopped, apparently struck by a sudden thought. “Wait. If we go back, does that mean I have to not be the ship anymore?” She looked decidedly unhappy at that possibility, and Taleene took a moment to reassure her.

“I’ll have a ship set aside for you to play with, if I’m able; maybe one of the _Vigil’_ s we use as Outriders.” She considered her options carefully. “It may be that if I can give him a way to reach and control this nexus, the Emperor will overlook my failure to take the Hoth system, and kill Skywalker.” She smiled as brightly as she ever did these days, which wasn’t saying much. “If I really can use this power to transport us back, we may still be able to carry out the attack before the Rebel’s spies warn them!”

Dawn was obviously out of her depth when confronted with possibilities that were that far-ranging, but she nodded enthusiastically anyway, happy because her sister seemed happy.

“Then get to it! Do you need a shuttle to go down there or what?”

Taleene was keying information into her screens, and shook her head without looking up.

“No, that would be unwise. You see, what happened to us wasn’t an accident; someone _directed_ the nexus to affect us as it did.”

Dawn had begun swimming around the inside of the dome, her projection moving as if it were immersed in perfectly clear water, even to the rippling of her long, brown hair.

“Huh? Somebody brought us here on purpose?”

The Sith nodded, fingers still busy.

“Yes. I could feel him down there, and whoever he is, he’s intimately connected to the Nexus, though not actually at its physical location.” She touched a screen, and a holographic depiction of a sprawling settlement appeared. There were no buildings taller than twenty meters or so, and most were far more modest. Still, it was an entire valley; a fair-sized place in which to hide and wait. A steady blue point appeared as Taleene manipulated the image.

“The nexus is here. That’s where I’ll need to go, eventually, but first, I need to draw this stranger out.”

Dawn’s eyes went wide, and she swam downwards to hang upside down directly before Taleene.

“Are you going to fight a duel with him?” She looked frightened at the idea, which made the Sith’s heart give a little twinge. “Don’t _do_ that! You might lose!”

Taleene reached out to give her sister’s ghostly nose a little poke, then she waved her hand to shoo her back, as the girl’s cloud of drifting, translucent hair was blocking her view of the screen she wanted.

“Don’t worry, I’m not so foolish as to meet him in his place of power, where he would have every advantage.” She drew lines on her screen with an armored fingertip. “No, what I’ll do is provoke him, draw him out of hiding. And when he shows himself, I’ll deal with him.”

Dawn nodded, relieved, though she was also looking uncertain.

“How are you going to do that? Should I try and get him on the communicator? Oooh! I can send down some probe droids to assassinate him! Or load up one of the Landing Barges with all kinds of super-awesome armored death machines and flatten him!” She looked gleeful at the prospect of seeing more of her toys in action. “I’ve been looking at the manifests, and we don’t have any of those silly giant walker things, but what we do have is so much better--!”

Taleene raised one hand, and waited for the girl to calm down.

“No, nothing that complicated.” With a small, icy smile, she tapped her screen, sending the information to Dawn’s targeting subsystems.

“Bring the Hellbores online, and prepare for planetary bombardment to these specifications.”

The valley that held the settlement was centered precisely in the targeting reticule.

* * * * *

It happened so _fast_.

The three of them were making excellent time, moving as a group, with Leia sandwiched protectively between the two larger, armored soldiers. They had found a street sign that indicated a direction for something called the ‘Sunnydale Municipal Airport’, which at least sounded vaguely like a place they might find a transport ship that could get them away from this awful place. They ran on, Leia wincing with every step, but finally feeling some real hope.

Which was when Hudson’s head was abruptly sliced through by a machete, in a horizontal line just below the rim of his helmet. Leia screamed in sheer reflex and horror as the man’s body flailed, fell, and lay twitching, his weapon spraying bullets uselessly into the side of the burning ground transport that had concealed his murderer. Hicks stared as the looming figure stepped fully into view, wide eyes locked on the dark eyeholes of that plastic mask, and he wasted a precious second in shoulder-blocking Leia out of the way as he raised his weapon.

The rifle chattered for an instant even as the masked thing stepped close, absorbing the burst of explosive rounds to the stomach as it reached out with its free hand, clamped it across the soldier’s face, and _shoved_. Leia heard the snap of the man’s spine as his head was pushed back far enough for the rear of his helmet to rest between his shoulder blades. Hicks fell limply to the ground, and the thing turned towards Leia.

“Die, _fuckermother_ ,” She whispered, in honor of Hudson. Her rifle barked forth short, precise bursts, at a range of barely five meters. The rounds struck it in the chest once, then again then again, the impacts actually forcing it back a step, then another, then another. She shifted her point of aim, fired, fired again, and was rewarded by seeing the arm wielding the machete fly off to the side, severed just above the elbow. The creature, whatever it was, never made a sound, never showed any recognition of pain, it simply kept coming at her. When it advanced once more, she toggled her selector, braced her feet, and fired a grenade into the bloody cavity her first bursts had carved. The grenade detonated, blasting a huge, hideous crater out of its chest, and throwing it violently backwards to crash into a red, octagonal street sign. Leia was out of grenades, but the indicator showed a handful of rifles rounds still remaining. She walked forward, till she was just out of arm’s reach, raised the rifle, took careful aim, and emptied the gun into the creature’s mask.

Shattered bits of plastic, blood, flesh and bone all sprayed the letters of the sign that spelled out ‘Stop’ as the right half of the thing’s skull was blown off. Finally, _finally_ it went down, slumping down along the sign’s post till it rested in an awkward sitting position, dead.

Leia stood there, panting, shaking, afraid to look away for fear that it would somehow get back up. Moments passed, with nothing but the distant howls of a Rakghoul pack to mark them. She backed away slowly, very much aware that she was still in danger from any of the other creatures running wild in the darkened streets. The thing stayed where it sat, unmoving, and she let out a long, shuddering breath. Unsure if either of the two soldiers had any more of the clips which fed the rifles, she edged to where Hicks lay, sadness filling her... and then blue-white bolts of fire began to rain from the sky.

She gasped, staring upwards. Far above, directly overhead, she could make out a faint, elongated triangle that just had to be one of the Empire’s new command ships. The energy bolts raining down were massive, and they streaked down in a continuous rain... to crash into the surrounding hills on all sides of the settlement. Brilliant flashes made her eyes water as megatons of energy were instantly translated into heat and explosive shocks that made the ground shudder, and deep pits surrounded by now-molten rock and soil marked a ragged line across the hillsides. Thunder boomed and rolled in a continuous assault on her ears as she turned slowly, scanning the more easterly slopes, and it was the same. The bolts were falling in a circle around the town, either into the hills, or, to the south, into the ocean, some distance off shore. Every land impact threw huge, savagely violent jets of vaporized earth skyward, while off the coast thousands of tons of seawater were explosively flashing into steam, creating a fast-spreading fogbank. Only the fact that nearly all of a plasma discharge’s force turned into heat on impact, and not an more conventional explosion, kept the entire settlement from being destroyed in an instant by multiple overlapping airblasts. As it was, she was having trouble keeping her feet under her, both from the ground’s constant shaking and the rapidfire thunderclaps that were hammering everything within the valley. Leia wondered if this was merely some intimidation tactic... or perhaps, unbelievably, the Imperials were performing some sort of quarantine operation, to contain the Rakghoul outbreak. Her confusion this turn of events was profound... and short-lived.

One moment she was staring at the ring of fire being drawn all around her--and in the next, she was staring dumbly at the jagged, gory post that protruded a full meter from a point just below her sternum. Her lower body instantly went numb, and for what felt like a very long time her dazed mind couldn’t understand why she had yet to fall. Slowly, awkwardly, she managed to turn her head, and then she understood.

Half of a white mask stared back at her, the faint outline of a human eye visible in the dark eyehole for the first time. The other half of the mask was still missing--as was that half of the creature’s skull. It didn’t seem to matter; it had stood up, used its remaining hand and arm to twist and snap the red sign’s upper two meters free, and then slammed it through her back. The creature lifted her, and held her suspended, impaled, her bare toes half a meter off the ground, her clumsy hands fumbling uselessly at the spear that held her aloft.

“S-stop,” She whispered, reading the word on the sign behind her. It was funny, somehow, in a way she could never have explained in a million years.

Leia stared at the unstoppable thing, waiting for it to finish her... and it didn’t. Instead, it raised that ravaged head slightly, staring mutely at the fiery bolts coming down on all sites.

“ _Stop_....” Leia whispered again, and tried hard not to laugh as the blood flowed from her lips.

* * * * *

Dawn’s glowing image looked at her.

“Is anything happening?”

Taleene closed her eyes and reached out. She was the most gifted Force-sensitive either the Jedi or the Sith had seen in generations, and yet she still couldn’t pinpoint her foe’s exact location. He was within the circle the _Aurora_ had drawn in fire and thunder, of that she was certain. And yet....

She shook her head, eyes opening as she looked down at her screens. 

“Nothing. He’s hiding himself from me with the energy from the Nexus; it’s like a flash-flood, washing over the whole place.” She stared at the image, where a real-time image of the valley was displayed, with the light levels helpfully enhanced to artificial day. The ten-kilometer circle was being scribed and re-scribed by twenty-four of _Aurora’s_ Hellbores, each of them firing once every five seconds, stitching their way around the perimeter of the town. Torrents of vaporized rock were being flung into the air with each shot, and the infrared scan showed the air in the valley was growing dangerously hot. 

Taleene sighed at the faint twinge of distaste she felt, then went ahead and gave the order.

“Let’s push a little harder and see if he sticks out his head. Three more, inside the circle, continuous fire, random pattern--but do _not_ hit the Nexus.”

Dawn gave her a little salute, even as her floating image began to rotate slowly counterclockwise.

“RogerRoger.” A moment’s pause, then: “Boom. Boom. _Boom!_ ”

* * * * *  
[](http://postimage.org/)

Cordelia was wailing wordlessly, her terrified squalling driving Giles dangerously near the brink of swatting at her with a rolled-up newspaper. The ground’s shaking and the thunder which was rattling the costume shop’s front window made it feel like the world was ending. Ethan was little more than a floating torso now, his smile a rictus grin as the transparent flames consumed him.

“Stop this!” Giles shouted over the constant drumroll of thunder. “Ethan! End this spell now, while you still can!”

His old friend, his old enemy, only laughed.

“It _is_ ending! Your Slayer, the darling child, is about to end it, just as you’d hoped.” The shop shook, much more violently than before, as some sort of blue-white flash reached them from the front room. An instant later the front glass blew in, and Cordelia’s mingled squall and scream followed close behind. Ethan nodded, even as parts of his face began to disintegrate. “Lovely girl; tell her I wish her luck, when you see her.” His grin faded, and he gave Giles a look that seemed almost sane.

“Even afterward, everything you knew will be changed, forever. Something new has come into the world. Something glorious.” Giles gaped at him, and the other man’s grin returned, full force, as his torso ran like melting wax. “Now run. _Run!_ ”

He ran.

Grabbing Cordelia on the way, ignoring her panicked clawing that had his arm wet with blood in just moments, he ran through the shop, through the door that hung ajar, and into the rubble-filled street. Dust and smoke hung everywhere, reducing visibility to just a few yards. The heat was like standing in an oven, combining with the dust to make breathing nearly impossible. Constant flashes of blue-white light strobed brilliantly through the dense haze, and world-shattering detonations hammered at them, sometimes closer, sometimes further distant, but never ceasing. Choosing a direction at random, he dragged the struggling girl behind him as he ran for both their lives.

* * * * *

Everyone in the SGC was staring in horror at what was unfolding before them.

The aliens were attacking a civilian target. 

Hammond was on the phone, in a three-way conversation with the President, and the senior officer of the Strategic Missile Command, who was currently based in NORAD headquarters, roughly six hundred feet directly over Hammond’s head. The time had come to fight back in any way they _could_ fight back, no matter how small the chance of success.

* * * * *

Dawn was fidgeting, shrinking herself down a bit and trying out different designs of fairy wings as she watched the bolts streaking off to vanish against the bulk of the planet below them.

“If you let me cut loose with a full broadside, I could finish this in about a second,” She grumbled, wings fluttering. “Six hundred Hellbores hitting that place, instead of just three; that guy would be dead before he knew what hit him.”

Taleene glanced at her, then looked back to her screens.

“I want to draw him out, not send him into hiding. If he gets away, he’ll be back later to ambush us when we’re not expecting it.” She studied the visuals. Optical was useless; the entire valley was hidden under dense clouds of dust and steam. _Aurora’s_ other sensors were able to show her a clear picture of the settlement, however, and she eyed the destruction with dispassionate eyes. 

_More than a third of them must be dead by now; over ten thousand people. Not even a shadow of what Tarkin did at Alderaan, and what I do here at least serves some purpose other than simply terrorizing my enemies._

“Continue as ordered. If he doesn’t show himself soon, then sheer chance will drop one of those bolts on his head, and I’ll be able to take control of the--”

She froze, staring, openmouthed, as the universe shifted around her.

* * * * *

Ethan Rayne felt the last bits of his physical body fraying to nothing even as the bolt of blue-white death came smashing down. It wasn’t coincidence that the events were simultaneous; his dissolution had occurred exactly _because_ he would die in this place, at this time. The rampaging energies of the Hellmouth had wrought that and other similar, backwards-strange events, as they ran their course.

Now, as his physical form was obliterated, he stretched as far as he was able, hoping to pull himself to safety in some new, different place and time.

He smiled one final time as everything went white, wondering if he would succeed.

* * * * *

The flash seemed to come from all around them, and the blast that followed left them reeling... for a fraction of a second.

The earth surged upwards, slamming Giles and Cordelia flat against the pavement, then dropped, tossing them, spinning, through the air. He came down in an ungainly sprawl amidst a sad, dust-choked hedge. Cordelia landed, spread-eagled, atop a parked car that had seen better days.

The librarian was wheezing for breath as he pulled himself to his feet, the side of his face prickling with an incipient burn from the flash that had landed so close. Cordelia sat up, coughing and clutching at her stomach, and as he stumbled towards her he at first thought his streaming eyes were playing tricks on him. It was only when he reached her that he was certain--her cat ears and cat’s tail were gone.

* * * * *

The tall, gangly, teenaged boy collapsed, instantly dead, his arm and half his head missing, his chest mostly blown away.

Willow was dropped unceremoniously to the ground, still impaled on the sign. She lacked the strength to scream, lacked the strength to do anything but laboriously pull in a breath, very shallowly, through the blood bubbling from her lips, then push it back out again.

Pull the next one in--

And push it out.

It was heartbreakingly difficult. Impossibly difficult, and she knew after the second one that she was finished, that it was over.

She dragged a breath in; a bare sip that was still a victory.

And she pushed it out.

Tears streamed from staring eyes that she couldn’t even make blink.

In.

Out.

Again.

Again.

_Again._

* * * * *

Dawn stared at Buffy for several seconds, wondering why she’d stopped in the middle of talking that way. Even stranger, she was staring off into space, her eyes blank and her mouth open.

“Taleene?” She sent her holographic self fluttering down on delicate fairy wings, to hover cutely before her sister, her image now stabilized at exactly one meter in height.

“Taleene?” Nothing. “Um... is this some kind of Force thing? Should I leave you alone while you watch your visions or--”

Buffy _keened_ , an agonized, breathless, nearly soundless exhalation that folded her over, forehead touching the brushed metal of the console before her. Dawn flinched back, staring in shock as her sister made that horrible, terrifying sound over and over again, as fast as she could refill her lungs. Her tiny fists clenched tight, she raised her head, and her huge grey eyes were windows into hell.

* * * * *

_I killed Xander._

The thought had held her forever, or so it seemed. When it all changed back, when whatever had taken hold of her on the street, when she was there with the smiling, laughing children... when that thing had suddenly let her go, a small, odd little thought had immediately bubbled up in her mind: _I killed Xander._

Just that.

And she stopped--everything she was doing, everything she was thinking--it had all just stopped, while she tried to understand the meaning of those three words. For the longest time it seemed like they were a mystery that would forever be beyond her, that years would pass, and she would grow old and feeble, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren, without ever having puzzled out what those words meant.

And then understanding came, between one heartbeat and the next, and that was when the weight of the universe landed on her, and crushed her, and she knew that it was only what she deserved.

She was vaguely aware that her body was trying to scream, but it was all terribly far away and unimportant.

_I’m evil. I’m sick. I‘m worse than the Master, worse than any of the things I‘ve fought. I killed Xander, and I_ liked _it._

It had made her feel stronger, to punish him for his weakness. It had helped her forget her own fear and uncertainty, to punish him for feeling those things.

_I killed Xander._

She felt the bitter sickness surge up inside her, and folded forward once more.

* * * * *

Dawn didn’t know what to do. She didn’t have access to the medical telemetry from Buffy’s armor, but what she was seeing _couldn’t_ be good. Buffy was panting and trembling like she was on the verge of a seizure (which Dawn knew all about, from her final few weeks in the hospital), and when she suddenly jackknifed forward and spewed vomit all over her screens, the ghost-girl gave an involuntary little shriek of dismay.

“Ahhhh!” She fumbled through her directories and command trees, searching for options. 

“Medical droids! I want _all_ the medical droids to Taleene’s--oh, wait. Aghh!”

She couldn’t do that; no one but Buffy herself could open the doors to the section that held her quarters, and they were massively thick. It would take forever to get the properly-equipped droids there, and longer still for them to burn their way inside. Neither could she herself directly affect anything within that section, thanks to the same security precautions--precautions that were hard-wired in place, to keep a Slicer from letting in his pet assassin, or simply venting all the atmosphere into space.

_Is this an attack?_ She wondered, her mind whirring through a thousand scenarios every second, searching for an answer. _Did the evil person on the planet do this to her? Should I stop shooting the town, so that he’ll stop, or shoot it with_ everything, _and hope I kill him before he kills her?_

In a vastly-slowed sliver of time, a little girl made of crystal, metal, and flickering green energy debated the fate of twenty-one thousand human beings... and then decided.

The relentless hammering of the cannons ceased, and she looked again at her sister.

“Buffy? Buffy, can you hear me? I stopped the bombardment... was that the right thing? _Buffy!_ ”

Her sister’s shuddering was only getting worse, and somehow, that same motion seemed to be spreading outwards. Dawn watched, uncomprehending, as every object within the transparent dome began to shake, then to crumple, then to _move._

* * * * *

_Xander--and thousands more,_ millions _more!_

She remembered the destruction of Alderaan, where she had stood by Tarkin’s side while he had committed genocide on a whim. She remembered the slaughter of Jedi by her hand, the fierce joy of it, be they greybeards or only children. She’d hated them all, she’d killed them _all_ , until Merrick--somehow it had been Merrick, her first Watcher--had found her, and with the last four remaining Jedi, he had defeated her, though she had managed to slay them all, save him.

A hundred battles, a thousand murders, one after the other, replaying themselves in her mind, along with the things that she _knew_ to be real, the things that she, herself had done. Xander’s death, the destruction of the military base that had launched the missiles at her, the--

She gasped, eyes half-clearing till she realized it had stopped--that utterly strange knowledge that came when she reached for it telling her that the firing had stopped... but that more than a third of the people who called Sunnydale home were dead by her hand.

The thing that was a part of her, that extra self that acted on what she wanted when she willed it or wished it, that thing, that Force reached out now. It took hold of every object it could find, gripped them tight, and pulled them toward her.

* * * * *

When everything ripped itself loose from its mountings, Dawn shrieked--not that it was audible in the meditation chamber, because the speakers were included among the things that were ripped free, as were the projectors for her hologram, which flickered and vanished. Left with only two tiny visual pickups, high up on the interior of the dome, she watched helplessly as Buffy crushed the wreckage and debris into a ball with herself at the center, the mass compacting itself ever more tightly, moment by moment, as the girl tried to crush herself to death.

* * * * *

_I killed Xander._

Those words would never go away; not ever. All she could do was deny them a place to live, deny them a living person to haunt. Pulling the shredded remains of her nest ever tighter, she felt her armor straining to preserve her, felt it struggle to keep her safe, to keep her breathing. It was a wondrously well-engineered machine, but she was stronger than it was; evil, twisted, hateful... but strong. She pulled again, harder, and felt it begin to weaken as her senses began, mercifully, to fade.

[Buffy?]

She tried to ignore the voice, there was nothing more to say, nothing left she could do. She had killed Xander, and so many others, both real and imagined... unless she only _thought_ the other life was imagined; it was entirely possible that she was mad, that it was _all_ real, and that she was even more vile than she’d feared.

[Buffy, you’re scaring me a _lot_ and I don’t know what to do and I would scream at you but you broke the speakers and this cyber comm doesn’t have a scream setting--believe me, I looked--and you have to stop being crazy now because you’re killing yourself and I don’t have anyone else and if you leave me here all alone I’ll go crazy too!]

It was the girl, Dawn, the imaginary sister of her imaginary, even more evil self. It saddened her, to think that the girl would be alone, but then, once Buffy was gone, her imaginary creations would vanish with her; it only made sense. Still, she was sad, for some reason, to lose the sister she had never really had....

She squeezed harder, striving for death, reaching eagerly for the peace that oblivion would bring her.

_\--Peace is a Lie--_

It was her thought, but not her thought. It was a memory from her other self, the version of her that had done so many awful things, just as she had done awful things. That girl, that Buffy--she was still there; all of her was still there, and it was difficult to tell where one of them ended and the other one began. They were both Buffy, after all.

[Buffy, I _swear_ if you don’t become uncrazy right _now_ I’m gonna drop a big scary missile on that stupid town under us! There’s still way more than half of it kinda-sorta standing, and lots and lots of people, so I think that evil guy with the Force powers must be down there, staring up at us and sending crazy beams into your head or something, and I am _going_ to make that whole place into one ginormous crater unless you stop squishing yourself and talk to me!]

She wondered if Willow was down there, if she were alive or dead. If she was dead, then Buffy’s self-inflicted death was even more deserved. If she was alive, then the thought of facing her was more than she could bear.

The sphere of debris was trembling, still pressing inwards, but the pressure was no longer increasing.

_There’s something; that Force thing is whispering to me... Willow._

Distantly, faint as a kitten scratching at a window, she thought she could hear Willow’s voice, calling out to her.

_She’s alive. She’s hurt. She’ll find out I killed Xander._

The thought of that one happening hurt like a knife twisting in her gut. She would rather die now than see the loathing and hatred in Willow‘s eyes that would come from that knowledge.

_I disgust myself, I hate myself._

_\--That isn’t anything new. A Sith burns in a fire she feeds with pieces of herself. Use it, channel it, let it give you the strength to do what must be done--_

Again, it was her voice, her thoughts, but a darker shade of her thoughts. Not a separate part of her, just the other side of her. 

_I can’t face her_. 

The debris crushed inward, hard, then eased slightly.

_\--You can_ save _her. Facing her will be painful--so what? Life is pain, death is useless. Live. Go to her. Save her.--_

It wasn’t like talking to another person, it was like having an argument with yourself... when you knew in your heart what the right answer was all along.

_I love her, like I loved_ him. _No matter what I am, or what I’ve done, I can still do one good thing._

She took hold of the hate and self-loathing that were trying to destroy her; took hold of them, grappled with them, and turned them to a new purpose.

_There isn’t time to be weak; Willow will die if I‘m weak._

The thought was her own, shared by both sides of her, light and dark, both at once.

_Passion. Strength. Power. Channel the fire. Don’t let it consume you. Use it._

_NOW!_

* * * * *

The smushed-up ball of stuff exploded, and Dawn took a completely unneeded breath as a rumpled, unsteady, and very scary-looking Buffy rose to her feet. With no working microphones in the dome, she could only hear what Buffy whispered because of her link to her sister’s comm.

“ _Willow. Willow... hold on. I‘m coming._ ”

* * * * *


	4. Three minutes ago, and elsewhere

Three minutes ago, and elsewhere....

\--And she was thrown, flying, flailing, and kicking, tumbling through the thick and humid air, to the very edge of the jungle clearing. Slamming into the trunk of a gnarled and towering tree, she fell to the damp earth with a grunt, gasped for a moment, then forced away the pain and shock of that impact. She surged up, regaining her feet and resettling her grip on the short, wickedly-gleaming axes she held in each hand.

Thirty feet away, the hulking, vaguely manlike thing that had thrown her was advancing again, and to her left and right she could see the rich, fetid muck of the forest floor twitching and moving. Even though the clearing was illuminated only fitfully, her night-seeing eyes could plainly see the next wave of monstrous creations taking shape there: four serpents formed from moist, insect-teeming soil and tangles of long roots and vines, rising on their coils and turning their questing snouts in her direction. And, a short distance away, something else was forming: a monstrous spider made of stinking earth and an entire thicket of briars, large as a bull and everywhere bristling with long, wicked thorns. The thing hissed wetly as it pulled free of the earth that had birthed it, a sound straight out of nightmare. All six of these creations stared at her with eyes of poisonous green light, the emerald glow radiating madness and hate. The human-form creation lumbered forward to join them, eight feet tall if it was an inch, half of its crudely-formed head missing thanks to an earlier swing of her axe, its one remaining eye glowing luridly with mindless evil.

Despite herself, the girl took an involuntary step backward. The streams of sweat covering her face and trickling down her sides were not a product of the heat and humidity that were a fact of life here in the jungles of central Belize; she had been fighting hard for over ten minutes now, and for every magically-animated beast she destroyed, another was raised to take its place. Her fighting spirit was strong, but she was beginning to despair, and that wasn't even taking into account what was about to happen to the children....

Hissing laughter brought her head around with a snap, and she stared sullenly at the creature responsible for all of this, even as she reflexively straightened her spine and lifted her chin, drawing her dignity about her like invisible armor. The animated forms froze in place at the sound of the laugh, as their master's will was momentarily directed towards other things.

“Not sssso sssstrong asss you'd believed yoursssself to be, are you?” The short, lizardlike creature shifted its twisted wooden staff from one side of its face to the other, peering at her from within the ragged, rotting cloth robe and hood that mostly covered a form that seemed just as misshapen as the stick it leaned upon. “No match for my magicksssss, are you, champion of humankind? No match for the ancient power of the foressssstssss!” It tapped the butt end of the staff on the ground, and a bright green flame bloomed in the air above the upper end, hovering several inches over the wood. That eerie illumination combined with the more mundane light of the torches already burning, and the sound of quiet sobs drew her eyes once more to the reason she was here.

The children; eleven of them, boys and girls both, were lying on the low, timeworn stone slab that filled the far side of the clearing, their prone forms arrayed around the lizard mage, small bodies nestled into shallow depressions carved from the stone. Each basin was connected to the others by an intricate, eye-twisting pattern of grooves, and at the rear of the slab, eleven carved channels led to the feet of a looming statue, the worn and crumbling stone image barely recognizable as a humanoid lizard much like the one leering at her now. The grooves were all glowing, very faintly, with green light, and from where she stood she could just make out the ceremonial dagger of shiny black stone lying ready. The girl knew that, unless she somehow managed to prevail, the ancient pattern would soon run red with innocent blood.

“Tha' children,” she said, speaking for the first time, her English strongly flavored by her pronounced accent. “Release dem, an' I shall give you a queek and merciful death.”

That only made the lizard mage laugh again, more loudly than before.

“Ssstupid girl! It issss _you_ that ssshall die tonight!” It waved the flame-tipped staff across the carved stone of the slab where it stood, and the small forms of the children twitched as they struggled, but the green magic held them there, paralyzed and helpless. “Thessse ssshall give their warm, pure blood to the old one. He ssshall drink of it; he ssshall awake!” He took a moment to glance up at the face of the statue that loomed over them all, then turned back. “And then ssshall he destroy all of--”

She'd almost done it; she had almost managed to cross the entire distance between them in the brief moment when the creature was looking elsewhere.

Almost... but not quite.

With a hiss, he recoiled, gaining a critical foot or two; time enough and room enough to bring his staff up to intercept her axe, the green fire flaring from one end of the wood to the other. The weapons met, and the axe shattered with an ear-splitting metallic shriek, the honest, mundane steel no match for the magicks directed against it. Undeterred, the girl whirled, firing a kick beneath the staff, connecting with the creature's stomach and driving it back with a hissing wheeze, partially folded over in pain. She bounded forward, leaping high, her remaining axe looping up and then starting down even as she dropped towards the momentarily vulnerable creature--

\--Only to be slammed violently off to the side as one of the mage's creations barreled into her, the huge serpent surprisingly quick for something made of mud and vines. She struck the ground on her side, breath blasting out of her as she rolled frantically and tried to regain her feet before--

\--The spider was there, glaring at her from eight glowing eyes, liquid muck dripping from it like drool as it stalked her, so large that even when she stood, she had to look up to meet those eyes--

“Thisss, 'champion,',” the lizard creature hissed at her mockingly, despite being in obvious pain. “Thisss isss what it isss to _fail_.”

She feinted left, and when the spider rocked that way she darted right instead, scrambling towards the stone slab, only to be blocked by another of the snakes, as well as the humanoid creation, looming behind and raising crude fists as large as oversized sledgehammers. She gritted her teeth, darting from one side to the other, desperate now, but seeing no viable way to reach the only foe that mattered. Trained since childhood in tactics as well as combat, she recognized that she was facing a stalemate at best, and the knowledge brought an icy ache of despair as the mage bent to pick up the stone dagger. The quiet sobs of the children drove her to desperation, and she whirled through a spinning windup, then hurled her remaining axe with all the strength she had in her....

And the weapon shattered, just as the first one had, when the thing's staff swatted it out of the air in a move quick as the strike of a frog's tongue.

Weaponless now, and lacking saner options, she clenched her fists and prepared herself to rush forward, hoping to accomplish her mission even though it cost her her life. The mage moved to the first child, the spider advanced on the girl from her left, the serpents from the right, and the humanoid from directly ahead She narrowed her eyes, choose the best route available for her suicidal charge and then....

And _then_... the green fire enveloping the lizard mage's staff flickered... and went out.

The clearing dimmed, though the light from the plain torches around the stone slab remained bright enough for the creature's look of dull shock to be plainly visible. The girl herself was frozen for a moment, blinking in confusion as each of the looming, fearsome created forms menacing her stopped, slumped, and finally dissolved into slowly-spreading mounds of inert dirt and vegetation. A chorus of shrieks and yells pulled her eyes back to the stone platform, and she saw the children, all eleven of them, scrambling up out of their basins and away from the reptilian creature that had abducted them from their homes and families.

“W-what isss thisssss?” The robed thing hissed, gesturing with its staff at first one child, then at another, then another, it's motions growing quicker and more emphatic as the staff remained dark, and the children backed fearfully away, untouched by any spell of compulsion or paralysis. Even the pattern carved in the stone had gone dark; all traces of emerald light now extinguished.

“Ssssubmit! Obey, you ssstupid human hatchlingsss--!”

It broke off when it saw the girl approaching; slowly, without any sign of fear or hurry, her face impassive and her eyes cold. More gestures from the staff, one after the other, faster and faster, the scaled face contorted with what could only be fear, until the motions ceased to be attempts at spellcasting, and became instead a wild flailing meant to keep a relentless predator at bay.

“N-no! Ssstop!” It backed away, step by step as she advanced, until it came up against the base of the looming stone idol. “My magicksss! How have you banished my magicksss?!?”

It swung the staff at her with blurring speed--and she caught it in one hand, holding it there, inches from her temple, before easily wrenching it away. Holding it in both hands, she met the creature's eyes with the impassive eyes of an executioner. This, too, had been part of her training; to be emotionless and controlled, to never give in to passion or petty revenge. 

That said, she felt an undeniable sense of satisfaction as she broke the staff across her knee, and could not quite prevent herself from addressing it one final time.

“This,” she told it smugly, repeating it's own words back to it. “This is what eet is to _fail_.” 

Twirling half of the broken staff in each hand, she eyed the lizard carefully, then lunged forward, driving the oversized stakes through the thing's body so forcefully that it was pinned to the soft, crumbling stone of the idol, each of its two hearts pierced through and stilled forever.

Leaving it hanging there, she turned to the children, who were drawn up in a wide semi-circle, staring at her with huge eyes that held both fear and a dawning hope. Nodding to them, she took one of the torches and raised it.

“You are safe now,” she told them, doing her best to sound reassuring. “Come with me, your parents are waiting for you.” Slowly, but with growing confidence, they gathered around her, and she led them into the forest. They went slowly, since even with the torch, their merely human eyes had trouble picking out the details of the uneven path, but there was no hurry now. One of them, the youngest, who looked to be barely five or so, soon faltered, and looked as if she was very close to breaking down and crying uncontrollably.

Shifting the torch to her left hand, the girl bent and scooped the child up with effortless strength, carrying her in the crook of her arm as they walked on. The little girl's face cleared, and she beamed happily as she encircled her rescuer's neck with her small arms. Moving slowly, and careful to keep an eye out for any other monstrous things that might threaten, Kendra, Slayer of Vampires, led the children through the darkness, towards home.

* * * * *

_And Elsewhere...._

The Orb of Arenthalsia flickered yet again, the variations in its pale radiance an exquisitely-sensitive indicator of certain magical effects. Torrin the sage, however, called by some Torrin the Wise, despite his encyclopedic knowledge of Sorcery, had never seen turbulence such as _this_.

After frowning deeply at the still-flickering Orb, the old man turned back to the conjured spirits hovering patiently above the worktable in his sanctum.

“Wait. Stop.” He peered at them, his expression one of impatience. “My ears aren't as good as they used to be. Go back, please, and repeat that last bit?”

The spirits, appearing as three small areas of dimness in the otherwise bright room, roiled slowly in place, like tiny stormclouds.

Their replies came as words without sound, the information falling toneless and uncaring into his mind, like small gray stones dropped one by one into a well.

_\--Energies are shifting--_ said the first shadow, darkening slightly as it spoke the words.

_\--Patterns are changing--_ squeaked the second, bobbing slowly up and down.

_\--The foundations of this world are folding and refolding, forming and reforming--_ intoned the third, the soundless 'sound' of its voice deeper than the others.

The sage regarded them, and if his tone grew a bit cranky, well, he was old, and he'd _earned_ the right to be cranky. Especially when confronted with nonsense such as this.

“What does that even _mean_ , you cryptic, confusing little sprites?” He gestured at the cluttered room around them, and at the wider world beyond those walls. “My house is still _here_. The Earth is still _here_. The underpinnings of reality can't be wandering too far afield, else the whole lot of it would be melting into soup, or turning into one endless block of crystal, or blasting out in all directions as purple light and bright pink sparkles!” There was no response to that, which made him sigh and tug at his short, white beard in frustration. Of course there was no answer; beings such as this could provide information when properly prompted, but they could not draw conclusions from that data; that was why people needed Sages.

“Very well,” he said, finally, ignoring the way the Orb of Arenthalsia was flickering more erratically than ever. “Tell me _why_ this is happening. What set this change into motion?”

Each of the three shadows answered him in turn.

_\--Oceans of power, draining through a portal torn asunder, to a world unprepared, washing outwards, ever outwards, till the waves lap up against the furthest shores imaginable--_

_\--The myth is the pattern followed by the waters, the new myth; very new and very powerful. Embraced by so many, many minds; billions of humans touched by a dream of long ago and far away, a seed of creation taking root even as it is destroyed--_

_\--The girl wished carelessly, unaware and unintended, yet it was her wish, and now it is real, and because it is real the other things, the older things, must now become unreal--_

Torrin looked sharply at the spirit who had spoken that last.

“What girl? Tell me her name! Tell me what it is that must become unreal. Tell me _Now!_ ”

An answer was not forthcoming, since the Orb of Arenthalsia chose that moment to flicker one final time, then go dark entirely; something he had not thought possible. He stared at it in horror, for what felt like an eternity, struggling to understand what it could mean. 

When he looked back to the spirits, he found the air above his table to be empty of sourceless shadows, and in the hours that followed, his endless attempts to summon them once more came to nothing.

Nothing at all.

* * * * *

_And Elsewhere...._

“Quickly, sir! Come _quickly!_ ”

Quentin Travers ignored the panicked babbling of his subordinate and strode towards the scrying room at a measured pace. The trip from London out to the old estate had been annoyingly time-consuming, but there were some projects that simply couldn't be done in the Watcher's urban headquarters. Here, far from the loud and chaotic aura of modern life, the seers and mystics could see further, and more clearly, through both space and time. Here, in the ancient chambers beneath a sprawling, castle-like house the organization had owned for thirty generations, they could locate the proverbial needle in a haystack, even before the needle had finished _becoming_ a needle.

Yet another of the Watchers assigned to this posting came rushing down the wide corridor to meet him. This one, too, was wide-eyed and white-faced with fear over whatever anomaly had driven them to call London and beg him to come and hear their excuses in person.

“We don't know what's happened, sir,” the new arrival told him. “Things were going well, as we said in our most recent monthly report. We'd tightened the focus to within two hundred miles, and with a high level of certainty. All was proceeding exactly the same as always... well, except for the issues we had tracking the Summers girl, though of course that was a fluke that no one could have expected... and the next one after her, I suppose, was a bit of a misstep as well, but everyone has been working _extremely_ diligently this time around, I assure you, and we had every confidence, _every_ confidence that we would have the next Prime Potential pinpointed very soon and yet--”

Travers sighed. He should have known that this would be a case of the divination team failing in their task yet again.

“And _yet_ ,” he interjected acidly, “Somehow you've managed to lose your fix on the next girl?”

Both men winced, and rather than meet his eyes they looked at each other.

“Actually, sir... it's worse than that.” The man looked as if he expected to be kicked, and Travers was sorely tempted to oblige him.

“What do you mean, 'worse than that'?”

Neither of them seemed willing to answer him, or even meet his eyes, and his unhurried pace had brought him to the door at the end of the corridor anyway. The heavy, polished oak of that door was centuries old, as was the chamber it guarded, and he knew exactly what he would see even as he swung the door open to enter.

The room was circular, with wide steps descending towards the center, the arrangement similar to that of a small amphitheater, and the space at the bottom was dominated by a huge globe. Nearly three meters across, it was a hollow shell of intricately-carved yellow-white ivory, the thousands of tiny pieces fitted and fused together with surpassing skill by artisans long-dead. Landmasses and rivers were shown in great detail, though of course the borders of nations were not. The entire arrangement would normally have been hovering a meter off the floor, turning in place with glacial slowness. Many were the times Travers had stood at the railing of the middle level, watching as vague swirls of multicolored light had crawled across the surface of that globe, shifting and twisting into new shapes as the mystics performed their divinations, made their calculations, and performed endless, minute adjustments of the several dozen stands around the middle and upper levels of the room, each of which supported a complex arrangement of ivory and crystal designed to gather, amplify, and focus the energies of a very specific magical resonance. Eventually, over the course of weeks or months, the washes of light on the globe would begin to shrink, glowing more brightly as the area grew smaller, until finally there was only a blazing, laser-sharp point that revealed the next Slayer's position. Using that signature as a sort of homing beacon, the Watchers could then track down and acquire the girl with relative ease.

At least, that was the normal way of things, and, barring a few unfortunate lapses on the part of individuals who were no longer a part of the organization, it had served them very well indeed.

But not this time. The instant he stepped inside and laid eyes upon the chamber, he knew his underlings hadn't been wrong. This wasn't a lapse, this was utter disaster. The great globe was no longer hovering, or turning in slow synchronization with the Earth it represented. Instead, it lay on the stone floor of the lowest level, the bottom third of the ancient device crumbled beneath it, shattered bits of ivory lying scattered all around.

_So many lifetimes to gather those_ , he mused, the random thought flitting through his mind as he slowly descended the steps to the middle level. _Pieces of bone from every known Slayer in recorded history for the globe, and from ten thousand potentials for the focusing lenses._

“Sir!” The entire complement of scryers were there, fluttering uselessly as they hid behind their appointed spokesman. “T-things were going well, sir. Whatever happ-happened... sir, it wasn't our _fault!_ ”

Quentin didn't bother with a reply. Walking slowly around the circumference of the middle level, he surveyed the scene, then stopped short as he realized something.

_The lights. All these years, and I've never seen the electric lights used in this room._

There had never been any _need_ for additional illumination, not when the chamber had been softly lit by the glow of the crystals and the soft radiance of the globe. Now, however, those sources were dark, quenched by some mysterious event or attack, leaving only the harsh light of incandescent bulbs. 

The man regarded the lights for a minute, then turned to look at the globe, and then the lenses, on their stands. With a slow, dawning sense of dread, he reached into the pocket of his suit jacket and drew forth a group of small objects. Arranged on a large brass keyring, the various talismans were all potent magical items in their own right, a privilege granted the head of the Council so that he might defend himself against mystical or physical attack. Choosing a small, shield-shaped trinket made of some dull, pewter-like metal, he whispered a certain word.

Nothing.

The scepter next, then the feather, then the cup, the fox, the wheel.

None of them brought forth their magic, and he realized that even the usual subtle thrumming of power from the talismans was absent.

“Sir?” He glanced up, meeting the worried eyes of the head scryer. The man gestured at the ruined globe below them. “Sir, what do we do now? Shall we try to repair it?”

Travers shook his head, feeling a bit lightheaded from the implications of what he was seeing.

“The Slayers,” he began, then had to stop and clear his throat as he voice faltered. “The Slayers are not precisely magic, in and of themselves.” He stared at the globe, now utterly inert, blank and dark. “The Slayers should continue as before, in spite of whatever... event... has befallen us.”

The scryer glanced behind him at his comrades, then back to Quentin.

“But what of us, sir? What are _we_ to do, now?”

It was an excellent question, and for the first time in a very _long_ time, he had not the slightest idea.

* * * * *


	5. War Goddess Descending

The men and women of the SGC were going about their tasks with a grim intensity that he'd seldom seen before, even here. It was different this time. It was one thing to send their people into battle on some other world, or even to fight an alien threat within the tunnels and corridors of their base. This time, the enemy had bypassed what was supposed to be Earth's first line of defense, and dealt them a pair of terrible blows.

“--Second ground zero identified as Sunnydale California, listed as a Baker Three priority target: no nuclear facilities, no significant research or industrial assets, population less than fifty-thousand--”

“--Reporting the Delphi constellation is down to five birds, and _every_ satellite in the Argus net is gone; it'll be at least two hours before we can reposition something to overfly either of the targeted locations.... Yes, yes sir, we're readying reconnaissance aircraft now--”

“Additional ground forces are mobilizing; Army units and California National Guard--”

“--The western defense zone air patrols are already en-route. Yes ma'am, they're scrambling fighters out of Travis and Edwards to reinforce them right now, and putting everything they've got on the ready line in case of further--”

“--Need to keep emergency services in the loop also; until we know what we're dealing with here, in terms of radiation or toxic materials, they're to observe every possible safety protocol when they reach the sites and begin rescue operations--”

Turning away from the techs sitting at their stations, O'Neill lowered his head and frowned in thought. Vandenberg was at least a logical target; it had been the launch site for the missile attack on the alien ship. The second one, the town on the California coast... what was the point of _that?_ A less-than-medium sized burg in the middle of nowhere, seemingly unremarkable in every way. Unremarkable except for....

Jack looked up. Carter was buried in data, reading three screens at once as she tried to pull together everything they'd recorded during the bombardments. Hammond was looking over her shoulder, while speaking into a handset that connected him to the commanding officer of the NORAD complex, six hundred feet above them.

“Yes. Yes, I agree completely, General,” Hammond was saying. “At their current altitude, we _do_ have options open to us that we didn't have before.” He listened for a moment, then nodded as he spoke. “I concur. Nothing we're seeing here contradicts that.” Another pause, then: “Understood. We'll contact you if the situation changes.”

Reaching a decision, Jack moved to join the man, turning his head and catching Teal'c's attention as he did so. Hammond looked up as they approached, and his face showed his worry all too well.

“All US forces are on full alert, and the Pentagon is in contact with the United Nations and our NATO allies.” He glanced at the screens showing the immense ship hanging motionless over the west coast. “I wish there was more we could do, but other than helping to coordinate things, it looks like the SGC is out of this fight.”

“Actually, sir, about that....” Jack indicated the screen, and the immense vessel displayed there. “We might not be able to get on board that thing, but we _can_ get to... where was it? Sunnyvale?”

“Sunnydale,” Teal'c supplied, his voice impassive, though he was watching O'Neill closely. “In the state of California.”

“Right. There.” Hammond was regarding him doubtfully, so he looked to Carter for support. “You said the ship showed up directly over this town. Is it still holding position?”

She looked up from her screens and nodded.

“Yes sir. They've adjusted their altitude, but the ship hasn't shifted away from that spot.”

O'Neill looked back to Hammond.

“And they fired on that town... why? It's not like some little tourist trap town was going to start lobbing missiles at them.”

The General's eyes went thoughtful.

“You're saying there's a reason for the second attack beyond simple revenge. Something they were specifically targeting?”

Jack shrugged.

“Maybe. This might be whey they came here in the first place; to get rid of something hidden there, something they didn't want us to have. In which case I think we should _definitely_ have it, if it survived that attack... and we need to find out if it did ASAP.”

Hammond considered this only briefly.

“Agreed.” He looked immensely relieved to be doing _something_ about the situation, and Jack could absolutely relate to that. “What kind of transport did you have in mind, Colonel? I'd like someone from the SGC to be on-site to lead the search, but time is a factor, if there's still anything on the ground that's recoverable.”

O'Neill had a ready answer for that one; he'd been itching to spit it out ever since the notion had occurred to him.

“The X-44, sir.”

Hammond looked at him sharply.

“The MANTA? That's a _fighter_ prototype.”

Jack nodded.

“It's also the fastest thing we have in the inventory, and one of the testbed aircraft is at Peterson for evaluation right now.” Peterson was the Air Force Base that was effectively the surface portion of the Cheyenne Mountain complex. “Give the word, and I can be in the air in fifteen minutes.”

One of his favorite things about his commanding officer was his ability to act quickly in a crisis. Barely two seconds passed while Hammond weighed the various factors and possible repercussions involved in commandeering a billion dollar aircraft before he nodded.

“You have a go.” Carter pulled off her headset and began to rise from her chair, only to have him put her back with a look. “Not you, Captain; I need you here.” She was definitely unhappy, but sat back down without argument. Jack gave her a sympathetic half-smile, already turning and heading for the door.

“C'mon, T,” he told Teal'c. “We've got a sweet ride waiting for us topside.”

* * * * *

The lift doors slid aside, and Buffy hurried out, only to give a strangled _“Gurk!”_ of surprise and launch a punch that could have shattered brick... had it actually connected with anything solid. Instead, her small fist passed effortlessly through the face of the ghostly girl who'd been waiting for her just outside the elevator. That girl blinked, her expression going from concerned to _very_ concerned as she watched the Slayer stagger and spin through a full circle as the momentum of her swing nearly pulled her off her feet... and the insanely high-heeled boots that encased them.

“Um, Taleene... are you okay?” The projection's translucent lips moved in sync with her words, though the voice came from all around them. “And by 'okay', I mean 'Have you stopped being crazy yet?'”

Buffy finally managed to get her balance properly sorted out, but didn't dare move until she got a better grasp on what was happening to her. The physical sensations were incredibly strange and distracting; her body felt decidedly cold, without _quite_ being uncomfortable, though she couldn't tell if that was just her perception of temperature lying to her, or if the functioning temperature of her body had actually been altered. Likewise her skin felt... odd; not numb, but something that was similar, despite somehow at the same time being almost _too_ sensitive. The flexible armor that encased her was tighter than skintight, and even sleeker and sexier than the costume she'd been wearing, only this had an unnatural weight and solidity to it, as if it was made of something denser than steel, yet as supple as latex and leather. The weight didn't bother her, just the way it firmly squeezed every inch of her body, falling only slightly short of real discomfort— _that_ part she didn't like at all, only she had the distinct impression that if it were removed she would be left feeling horribly exposed and vulnerable, since even though she felt as strong as ever, there was also an unmistakable and unsettling sense of being somehow... fragile. She put her hands to her face, tracing her features with her fingertips, trying, despite the gloves, to verify that she was still herself, that she was still Buffy.

“Guess that's a 'no' on the not-crazy thing,” the small, translucent girl in front of her muttered quietly, her cute features scrunching up in a look that combined exasperation and worry. The Slayer took a breath, and gathered what composure she could muster—Willow needed her, needed her _now_.

“Computer,” she said, addressing the projection before her. “I need to get down to Sunnydale.” She tried her best to sound like she had the authority to order that, even as she struggled to find the appropriate sciency-sounding terminology. “Activate thrusters, lower the wheels, or legs, or whatever this thing has, and begin un-orbit-ing, um... procedures?” That got her nothing but a blank look from the techno-ghost, so she plowed desperately on. “Maximum power to the anti-matter and the Vorp Drive! Stat!”

The girl-shaped image before her was now looking _very_ confused.

“Huh?”

Buffy pointed at the floor. 

“Down, I want to go _down_.” She was very much aware that even her voice sounded different now; silvery-soft and whispery, even when she tried to use a normal tone, with a faint trace of something electronic lurking underneath, like half her vocal cords had been replaced with a high-tech musical instrument. “Land immediately, as close to the town as you can. Right _now!_ ”

The girl's projected expression went incredulous.

_“Land?_ You want me to land the ship? _This_ ship? On the _ground?!?”_

Buffy's frustration and growing panic made her feel like she was caught in a nightmare, where everything was happening in slow motion, and nothing she did could affect the world around her. Pressing her gloved palms to her temples, she squeezed her eyes closed tight.

_This isn't working. Willow is hurt, maybe dying, and I'm wasting time trying to figure out what to do, when I_ know _what to do_.

As confusing as the physical sensations were, the situation inside her head was worse. Two sets of memories: sixteen years of the old Buffy, the one who was the Slayer, and sixteen years of another Buffy, who had grown up to become Taleene, dark Lady of the Sith. Both of them were her, because she had _lived_ through the entirety of both of them. Willow's need had pulled her thoughts onto the track that proceeded from the Slayer's memories, because that version of her had known the shy girl, and the Sith never had. Now, though, in this place, at this moment, being the Slayer wasn't helping her _or_ Willow. She made the decision, released her mental hold on herself, and the transition happened almost instantly, with a horrible twisting wrench that left her momentarily dazed and breathless. And then....

Taleene straightened, lowered her hands, and opened her eyes.

“Dawn.”

The holographic projection of her sister eyed her warily, as if she might start gibbering like a Gundark at any moment.

“Do you think you should go lie down for a while? Or maybe your medicine dispensers need refilling or something, 'cause you're reallyreally scaring me with how you're--”

Taleene shook her head firmly.

“No. Now be quiet and listen.” Dawn's mouth snapped shut and the Sith spoke with calm authority. “Deploy a scouting force of stealthed probe droids to the settlement we just attacked; do that now. Set them to observe and evade only; no offensive action against the inhabitants. Also, prep my Fury for immediate launch, and make sure Central Medical is operational after the damage we took earlier. Tell the medical droids to expect a human patient with critical injuries. Keep your shields up, and point-defense on standby, but do _not_ fire on any more ground targets without my direct order.” The girl nodded, looking grateful to receive instructions that actually made sense, though the last part made her pout just a little.

“Okay, doing all that, but where are you going to go in your—Hey!”

Taleene hadn't waited for her answer; she was sprinting down the corridor at her best speed, her body once again feeling right and natural (or as natural as it ever did, these days) now that she was experiencing it from this side of herself. Ahead of her, another image of Dawn flickered into existence beside the arch that led out into the huge garden atrium.

“Are you going to fly down to that DarkSide energy thing you told me--”

She was past that image too, out and onto the walkway that spanned the gulf between the central admin tower and one of the several that held her palatal quarters. A telekinetically-assisted leap carried her the full length of the bridge faster than she could have run it, her long black skirt fluttering behind her like a wind-whipped banner as air rushed past, and then her stiletto-heeled boots were touching down at the far end with a delicate precision that instantly transitioned back into a full run as she sprinted inside and through a series of spacious, opulent rooms and tastefully-decorated hallways. A decidedly irritated-looking Dawn materialized in front of her just as she reached a wide intersection of darkly-paneled corridors.

“--DarkSide thing you told me about?”

Taleene ran through the projection, turning right and covering another forty meters before she found the room she wanted, sliding to a stop just inside the door, and thrusting out a hand. A dozen different types of lightsaber hung on the chamber's far wall; ranging from long daggers to something a native of Japan would call a Naginata. A sword that fell somewhere in between those two extremes leapt off the wall and across the room, slapping firmly into her palm. She was back through the doorway in an instant, running down a different corridor, towards a large reception room.

It was taking all of her wind to maintain this pace, so when Taleene finally answered, she spoke silently via her cybernetic comm implant.

[Yes, I'm going down to the planet.] The rapidfire _clickclickclick_ of her heels sounded loudly on the marble floor as she ran at inhuman speed down the long corridor. [Rush my ship's prep as much as you can; I need to get down there _now_.]

She reached the end of the corridor and ran out onto the expansive balcony, where another of Dawn's projected images was waiting for her. 

“ _What?!?_ You can't go down there yet! Those humans are--”

Taleene ran past, her legs a blur, and without hesitation dove over the railing. It was a twenty-five meter drop to the courtyard below, but the Force wrapped itself around her black-clad form, and she drifted downwards like a falling leaf. Using telekinesis to move herself like this was difficult; more than a few seconds at a time created an escalating feedback loop that required more and more strength to support herself, quickly making even her negligible weight impossible to support. So, she could leap great distances and save herself from falls, but sustained flight was beyond her.

“--Are going to be _really_ upset with us!” Dawn called up to her, from where she'd materialized on the flagstone patio below. “We just blew up two of their forts or villages or whatever—and they were trying to murder us even _before_ we did that!”

Touching down lightly, the Sith girl sprinted across the open area and down the length of a gently curving walk, towards a large arch set into one of the towering bulkheads that sectioned off her private sanctum from the rest of the ship. Her breathing was rapid and labored now, and she felt additional systems in her armor coming on-line to assist her scarred lungs as they pumped air in and out, while simultaneously feeding oxygenating compounds into her bloodstream to help support the high level of exertion.

[I don't have time to argue, Dawn.]

Another translucent image of her sister was waiting for her beside the blast doors, which responded to Taleene's approach and transmitted commands by obediently sliding aside.

“At least let me finish flattening the town first, so there won't be mobs of those people trying to--”

[No.]

She ran through the gap where the massively-thick doors were still sliding apart, down ten meters of brightly-lit tunnel, then through yet another set of still-opening doors. Just beyond that was an open space which held a bank of turbolifts. She threw herself at one of the waiting lifts, and another Dawn flickered into existence beside her in the pod as she keyed in her destination.

“Okay, then wait for me to load up a landing barge full of hovertanks to go down with you. Maybe even a couple of B--”

[No.] The doors slid closed, and the pod dropped swiftly down its tube, towards the lowest decks of the ship. Dawn was staring at her with wide, fearful eyes, and Taleene looked back without expression.

“It... it would only take twenty or thirty minutes to get them ready, and then you wouldn't have to be all alone down there--”

“ _No_.” Breathless as she was, the delicate, softly threatening music of her voice was still firmly resolute. “Twenty minutes is too long, Dawn. Two minutes is too long. I'm going _now_.”

The digital ghost of her sister looked ready to cry, frustration and fear plain on her face as she pleaded with Taleene.

“ _Why?!?_ What's going _on?_ ”

Taleene looked down, noted that she still held the lightsaber, and reached up and back, pulling the silken fall of her platinum-blonde hair aside with one hand, so that she could clip the meter-long sheathed weapon to her back with the other.

“There's someone down there. Someone I know.”

Dawn tilted her head slightly to the side and squinted at her doubtfully, looking like she was back to having doubts about her sister's state of mind.

“Um. _What?_ ”

Taleene nodded, a little hesitantly.

“It's sort of confusing, and I'm having trouble understanding all the details myself right now,” she admitted. “But she's hurt. She needs my help. And it's possible that I... care... about her.”

The lift doors slid open, and the Sith was through them like a shot, her telekinesis granting her more acceleration than the fastest sprinter ever born. Ahead of her, one of _Aurora's_ many hanger bays loomed, a vast, brightly-lit cavern filled with gleaming weapons of war. One of them, her personal ship, was surrounded by droids and support equipment, the engines already whining as they spooled up.

She crossed the distance in seconds, hoping she wasn't already too late.

* * * * *

Willow's universe was composed of exactly three things.

The first, and most obvious one, was pain. She hurt; she hurt so badly that where, exactly, the pain was coming from was completely irrelevant. Whether it was one injury, or a thousand injuries, or maybe even no injury at all, just did not matter. She couldn't remember what had happened to her; perhaps she'd fallen, maybe she'd been attacked... it was even possible that some random bit of magic was affecting her, and making her _think_ she was in agony, when it fact she was sitting in an extremely comfy chair (because there _had_ been that one time, with the cursed jade marble they'd found, where Xander had been absolutely certain that he had been transformed into a very small dragon).

The second component of her universe was the effort she was expending to stay alive. Every moment, and especially every breath, required a deliberate, heartbreaking effort. Everything she had, every particle of stubborn determination, went into dragging air in and pushing it back out, one small sip at a time. Every slow, labored beat of her heart was an act of will. She couldn't keep it up, she _knew_ she couldn't keep it up, but this breath wouldn't be her last one, and neither would _This_ one, and neither would _THIS_ one.

And then there was the third thing, the last component of the three that currently composed her entire world, the one that made the other two bearable: Buffy.

Buffy knew she was hurt. Buffy was on her way. Buffy was coming to save her.

She didn't know how she knew that; she had no energy to spare for things like details or doubt. All that mattered was that her friend would come, and all Willow had to do was hold on until Buffy found her.

Just one more breath.

And the one after that.

And the one after _that_.

Willow wouldn't give up, she wouldn't. But it hurt so much, and she was so very, very tired....

* * * * *

Busy as she was, Samantha Carter was not blind to the irony: after months of lying to her friends and family about what, exactly, she was doing for the Air Force, she was in fact, at this moment, studying deep space radar telemetry. Of course, her cover story hadn't included things like gigantic starships and hostile aliens, though there was little doubt that those would be headline material the world over for months or years to come.

Assuming of course that Earth's human population _had_ months or years, because if the aliens wanted to carry out genocide, they certainly had the firepower to do so. Either one of the weapon systems they'd used so far could effortlessly destroy cities... or reach even the deeply-buried room where she herself now sat. 

With an impatient shake of her head, Carter dismissed those thoughts and focused on the task at hand. 

“Have you been able to reacquire any of the smaller ships?”

The three technicians working with her all looked up from their consoles.

“No, ma'am.”

“Negative.”

“Not so far, Captain.”

She nodded acknowledgment and waved them back to their tasks. Before the second bombardment, eight smaller vessels had separated from the main one (though 'smaller' lost its usual meaning here, since each of those ships was far larger than anything humanity had been able to put into space so far). The lesser vessels had only been visible to Air Force instrumentation for a short time before they'd activated some kind of electronic countermeasures which completely masked them to radar. After that, only optical telescopes had been able to track them, and even that hadn't lasted long, since the ships had promptly split up and headed out of the inner solar system. Incredibly, they were moving at over twenty percent of lightspeed when the 'scopes lost their track, and still accelerating. Given the enormity of space, and the small size and insane speed of those ships, Carter didn't hold any great hope of finding them again.

And so, while her assistants scanned the sky with every optical instrument to which they could commandeer remote access, Sam herself concentrated on the gigantic triangular dagger still hovering in Earth's sky. That one wasn't bothering to hide itself on any wavelength, and so she was able to get a very good look at it. Radar and Lidar imaging of the hull showed only small areas of barely-visible damage to the underside, nearest to the where the super-warheads had detonated. The rest was mostly just a bewildering jumble: vast expanses of smooth metal dotted with odd structures, lines and seams that suggested enormous hatches or access ports, and on the dorsal side, visible now that the ship had turned side-on to Earth, what looked like the skyline of a city; a dense, irregular mass of structures that shone with a multitude of blue-white lights.

She was using a high-resolution infra-red instrument to try and get better imagery of the leviathan's engine assemblies when movement at the edge of the frame caught her attention; a tiny blip emerging from the immensely larger vessel. Frowning, she reduced magnification, found the dot again, tracked it, and zoomed back in once more. 

“Another ship,” she said, speaking aloud without having meant to do so. Checking her radar, she found it there too; a very faint return, as from a small target with at least some stealth characteristics. The image she saw in the near infra-red was of a vessel much smaller than the eight scouts or frigates that had departed earlier, but this one was _not_ heading for the outer system.

This one was headed for Earth.

* * * * *

The ship was a _Fury_ -Class interceptor/long-range scout, and was basically the size and shape of a cross between a TIE fighter and a small courier or cargo freighter. It was moderately stealthy, very well-armed, and _extremely_ fast, which was why she'd chosen it for her personal transport. The night-cloaked western edge of a landmass filled her view as she drove the ship straight at the surface, and it was growing visibly larger with every passing second, but the flight time from that altitude was still over two and a half minutes.

Taleene spent those minutes trying to come to terms with what had happened to her.

_Everything I thought I knew is a lie. Maybe._ She shifted uneasily in her pilot's seat, despite the restraints that held her in place. _I think I'm real, I_ feel _like I'm real, I remember living my life... but I remember being Buffy now, too, and Buffy remembers making 'Taleene' up based on the villain from a holodrama, or film, or whatever it is they call it here._

The Buffy memories were there when she reached for them, but were fainter than those of her life growing up in the Jedi temple, or even of her childhood on Tatooine. Both sets of recollections seemed complete, however, without the fragmentation that would accompany any form of mental conditioning or memory implant with which she was familiar. Which meant... what? They couldn't both be true, and Buffy remembered creating Taleene, not the other way around. So was that proof that the girl who had been kidnapped by the Jedi, who had learned so much and fought so hard and eventually destroyed her tormentors completely... was nothing but a lie? A fantasy?

_I refuse to believe that. Buffy remembers 'magic', too, and 'demons' , both of them things straight out of a child's story, so her memory of creating my history, and of watching those 'movies' that tell of the Empire's defeat by the Rebel Alliance,_ those _are the fantasy, those are the lie. They must be._

Taleene scowled, remembering her breakdown in her sanctuary tower, how the Buffy personality had exploded into her mind and taken control, nearly killing them both in a fit of despair and self-loathing. 

Despair, and self-loathing. Familiar things, to Taleene; very familiar.

_I still don't know for sure. She seems so odd; so careless and unguarded and vulnerable. And yet... there is strength there too. There's fierceness, and determination, and rage. As ridiculous as this 'Slayer' business seems, the girl doesn't seem so very far from what I might be, if I had grown up in a more forgiving universe._

She wasn't sure what to believe, now; which of the two of them was real, and she _had_ to know. 

Which was why she was doing this. The answers she needed, if they existed at all, were down there, in the ruins of a place called Sunnydale. Looking out at the world filling her view and growing larger by the second, she drew upon the Force and reached out, almost reluctantly.

It was there; bright and clear and unmistakable now that the wash of interference from the Nexus (from the 'Hellmouth'?) had faded to nothing. 

_There_ is _a Force-sensitive down there. Female. Injured. And somehow familiar, though that should be impossible._

She pulled back, shut that point of light and agony away, and blinked several times.

“Willow.” The whisper was so soft it was barely more than a movement of her silver-frosted lips. 

If she found the girl down there, if the person she was sensing now really was the same red-haired girl that featured so prominently in Buffy's thoughts and memories, then what would that mean? Would Taleene vanish in the face of that proof, leaving only the part of her that was the Slayer? 

Her lips thinned, and her grey eyes glittered with anger and determination.

“I have to know.”

The first wisps of the planet's atmosphere flitted past the ship, causing a tiny tremble in the flight controls. The Sith took a moment to settle the featherlight cyberlink headset more comfortably on her head, and reached up to flip the switches that activated the shields and armed her weapons. The Force was murmuring softly to her, and she knew her landing would not be unopposed.

* * * * *

Dawn had been desperately searching for possible options as far back as that trip down in the turbolift; by the time Buffy reached the the number six hanger bay, she'd spent a _lot_ of time looking for an answer.

Yes, she had exaggerated a tiny bit before, when she'd claimed to have expanded a single moment into a month of personal time, but she really could accelerate her mental processes and make the outside world seem to slow to a place of nearly-motionless statues. The effect didn't cross over very well to things she was doing outside her own neural net, though, like operating things via remote control, and besides, the silence and isolation of experiencing time like that got lonely (and sort of scary) pretty quickly.

In spite of that, she'd forced herself to do it, in several brief spates that lasted hours for her, and less than a second for the rest of the universe. She was _terrified_ of what would happen to her sister on the planet. Yes, Buffy was a Sith, and very smart, and super fierce, but there were _billions_ of humans down there. Not only that, they seemed to have a _lot_ of military hardware, much more than a properly-subjugated world of the Empire would ever be permitted to own. She could see lots of it mobilizing now, through her various sensor arrays, and just because those vehicles and weapons were primitive, that didn't mean they wouldn't _work_ —these people had certainly demonstrated that they knew how to build very good bombs.

Whether she would admit it or not, Buffy needed help, and Dawn was the only person within ten thousand light-years who could give it to her. So Dawn slowed time as much as she could, for as long as she could stand it, before letting it go, returning to real-time for a few moments to rest and 'breathe', to listen to her sister's final, confusing statement about the person down on the planet, and then she did it all again. While everything else moved at a crawl, she scanned the ship's inventory, she researched the capabilities of the various vehicles and types of equipment at her disposal, and skimmed accounts of battles where those things had been used against a less-advanced enemy. A lot of it was beyond her (she was only eleven years old... sort of), and even more of it was impenetrably dull (ditto), but she slogged through it as best she could.

By the time the lift doors had opened, Dawn had chosen her weapon. Before Buffy had sprinted half the distance to her ship, Dawn was dispatching every available repair droid to make a number of small, critical modifications to each of the attack craft she had selected. And even as her sister's vessel was launching, the girl was struggling with elements of her own computer network, trying to make the expert systems and semi-sentient helper intelligences understand just what kind of changes she needed them to make to the guidance and control programs for those vehicles.

Floating in the virtual space that was as real to her as the physical ship was to anyone else, Dawn's electronic avatar hopped anxiously from one foot to the other as she tried to keep watch on a hundred separate video, sensor, and cyber-network feeds. When she was in 'slow time', even the blink-and-you-missed-it actions of her peripheral systems seemed maddeningly unhurried, but when she let her perceptions fall back into their default one-second-per-second mode, the overwhelming sense that dire events were rushing past too quick to track left her shivering with dread.

Buffy's ship was screaming downwards, nose aimed straight at the center of the half-wrecked settlement, moving so fast that it had already overtaken the stealthed drop pods that encapsulated the probe droids Dawn had launched minutes earlier. Far below her, down in the middle atmosphere, a number of aircraft that _had_ to be military were heading towards that point also, their primitive sensors flailing about with radar pulses that reached Dawn's ears as an angry chorus of clicks and growls. Some distance further away, scores more of them were taking to the air from various widely-scattered locations, and most of them were turning, even as she watched, and accelerating towards the exact spot her sister was heading. Looking closer yet, she could even make out land vehicles, moving in suspiciously well-organized groups, rolling towards the still-smoldering valley they'd bombarded.

Lots and _lots_ of land vehicles.

Dawn whined softly to herself, briefly wishing she could just go back to her bright and warm pretend forest, where everything either loved her completely or was only evil in a comical and easily-defeated kind of way. Pushing that childish impulse away, the girl impatiently re-sent the order for the droids to hurry several hundred times over the next half minute, like someone endlessly pressing the call button to make the turbolift get there faster. Even though it seemed to take forever, the first batch of modified attack craft were mostly ready as Buffy's ship moved inexorably towards the planet. The armored access panels of each craft were now being replaced, and almost like they'd practiced it beforehand, groups of three droids climbed, in unison, into each of the vehicles to perform the internal modifications. 

Dawn watched them, looked back to where Buffy's ship was now just kissing the outermost reaches of the planet's atmosphere, looked back at the rows of attack craft, and scowled at the hapless droids through her visual feeds.

“Time's up, slowpokes. You can finish on the way down.”

She issued commands, and the hanger bay's automated systems obeyed. Twelve vehicles, each about half the size of her sister's attack transport, slid forward in their cradles, to where mechanical rams locked thick, puzzle-piece sections of advanced polyalloy into place around them, encasing each craft in its own complexly-faceted egg of dull gray material. In two cases a droid was a half-second too slow in closing up the external panels and getting clear, and was crushed into junk by segments of stealth plating being slammed into place. Within each of the craft, droids carried on with their tasks, taking no notice of what was happening outside except to brace themselves firmly as the pods were slid into a long row of waiting tubes. Airtight hatches slid into place behind each one, outer doors opened, and then powerful mass drivers hurled the pods into space. 

Still fidgeting anxiously, Dawn remotely activated the pods' thrusters, overriding several protocols to dial their power output past the imposed maximum, to just short of overload levels. The clutch of deadly eggs leapt forward like they'd been kicked, sacrificing most of their stealth characteristics in exchange for speed. Peering past the rapidly-receding shapes, she considered the sensor scans of the area surrounding Buffy's projected landing site and shook her ghostly head.

“I don't think twelve is going to be enough.”

The repair droids, who had been standing motionless in the bay, obediently turned and moved to the next row of attack craft, and began performing the same modifications upon those as well.

Satisfied that the second group would be ready to go soon, Dawn looked downwards once more. Four of the enemy aircraft were moving to intercept Buffy, with many more on the way, but the girl's electronic eyes were drawn to a single sensor return, one much further away from the target site than any of the others she was monitoring. Though it was obviously a product of the same primitive technology as all the rest, it was closing at a noticeably higher rate of speed, and looked like it would arrive not long after the second wave of fighters. 

Dawn's ghostly fingers twitched, and weapon turrets out on _Aurora's_ hull turned and tracked in response, but Buffy's orders had been clear, and she didn't open fire. Even so, she resolved to keep an eye on that particular sensor return. Something about the way it was streaking across half the continent to get to her sister made her nervous.

* * * * *

[](http://postimage.org/)  
[](http://postimage.org/)

 

Seventy thousand feet above the Utah/Nevada border, Jack O'Neill was cursing the shortcomings of modern military communications. Sure, the signal from his plane's radio transmitter was being scrambled and encrypted and frequency-hopped to a ridiculous degree, far beyond any enemy's ability to decode without devoting a few weeks and a building full of supercomputers to the task, but that did him little good if that signal wasn't reaching the person on the other end of the connection... or vice versa, which was the situation at the moment.

“Say again,” he said, again. “This is X-ray four-four, calling Sierra base: did not read your last transmission, please repeat, over.”

Bursts of crackling static filled his ears as someone on the other end tried their best to route around missing comm satellites. Yes, the military net was _supposed_ to seamlessly adapt itself and work around the holes an enemy might blow in the supporting infrastructure, but in practice that kind of thing always fell short of expectations.

“--an you hear me now, X-ray four-four?”

“Finally,” Jack muttered, before keying his mike. “I read you, Carter. What were you saying before? It was hard to make out; I could have sworn you said something like 'they're invading'.”

Even through washes of interference her voice was grim.

“They _are_ , sir. At first it was only one ship, something that reads as being similar is size to an Al'kesh.”

Teal'c spoke from his position in the second seat, directly behind O'Neill.

“The Goa'uld also possess troop transport vessels similar in size to an Al'kesh, though much less heavily armed. Their carrying capacity is quite limited, however. They carry at most three hundred Jaffa warriors.”

Another burst of static overrode part of Carter's reply.

“--n't the only one we're seeing. We just detected another twelve objects deploying from the mothership. We're having trouble getting a decent radar image of them, but judging from the output of their engines, they may be significantly larger than the first one.”

Jack scowled down at the desert whipping past so far below. 

“And all of these are heading for Bunnyvale?”

“Sunnydale. In the state of California.”

“Thank you, Teal'c. Carter?”

A pause, during which he could clearly picture her checking the latest data.

“Yes, sir; the follow-up flight also looks to be heading there.”

He checked his radar screens from pure habit, even though he knew it was useless. He was still more than six hundred miles away from the landing zone.

“What's going on with the first one?”

“It's entering atmosphere now, sir, at a sustained velocity that would destroy anything we have. A flight of four F-18's are about to intercept and engage.

Beneath his oxygen mask, O'Neill's lips tightened into a thin line.

“Understood. Keep me updated. X-ray four-four out.”

Checking his readouts, he ran the fuel calculations again. Thanks to the drop tanks they'd discarded over central Utah, they would arrive at their destination with a good fuel reserve; this despite traveling at multiples of Mach the entire way.

The X-44 MANTA was a technology demonstrator, an F-22 airframe that had been enlarged and rebuilt into what _might_ be the future of American air power, if it performed as promised. M.A.N.T.A. stood for Multi Axis No Tail Aircraft, which, while technically accurate, basically meant that engineers loved to hang cool names on their projects, and never mind the contortions required to make them fit. The essence of this design was that it had no control surfaces; none. No flaps, no rudder, not even a vertical tail. Instead, high-pressure air was diverted from the engine and through numerous ducts and nozzles to control the plane's attitude, like thrusters controlled a spacecraft. This led directly to several benefits; the oversized and greatly simplified delta wing provided greater lift, caused less drag, and allowed for greater fuel capacity and fuel efficiency. The monster engines they'd shoehorned into the thing to run the reaction control system also increased the top speed considerably. Effectively, only the structural limits of the airframe and the melting point of its skin imposed a top speed under Mach 4, and the supercruise capability of the F-22 had been preserved in this redesign.

All of which meant that at their sustained speed of Mach 3.5, Jack and Teal'c were a little over thirteen minutes away from the town that the aliens found so interesting.

“You know, I'm feeling less guilty now, about bullying that crew chief back at Peterson into giving us live ordinance.”

“Indeed. Though we are too late to engage the scout vessel, it may be that we can successfully intercept the main invasion force.”

Jack nodded, noting with approval the arrays of green ready lights that were spawning on his secondary console as Teal'c brought the weapons systems to life. The larger wing size and increased engine power allowed for a proportionally larger loadout of missiles too, as well as two rotary cannon where most modern fighters only carried one.

He wasn't wild about taking an unfamiliar plane into combat, but between the brute power of the thing and the reaction control system, it flew a lot like a hybrid between a Harrier jump-jet and one of the old F-15's, and he had plenty of flight time in both of them, so he figured he'd be able to manage.

“And who knows? We might just give that first ship down a little surprise too, if he tries to take off again with whatever it is he came down to find.”

He nudged the throttle a little further forward, carefully watching the temperature and stress sensors monitoring various parts of the airframe as their speed edged up to Mach 3.72. They really couldn't push it any further than that without ripping the wings off, but traveling at over twenty-eight hundred miles an hour, they were now only eleven minutes away.

* * * * *

Taleene's eyes went glassy as her cybernetic implant streamed data directly into her mind even as sensor images of sleekly dangerous-looking aircraft and crawling webs of vectors and intercept trajectories helpfully arrayed themselves in precise order on small screens to her left and right.

It seemed that the humans responsible for the defense of this continent, what her Buffy memories called the 'United States Air Force', were going to try to kill her yet again, this time in a much more personal fashion.

“Let them try,” she murmured, her hands resting lightly upon the ship's controls. There was nothing but deeply-shadowed planet visible through her cockpit canopy now; near-total darkness broken by the bright-glowing latticework of light that was the work of humankind.

The thickening atmosphere started to buffet her ship, and she reluctantly reduced speed slightly, while reconfiguring the shields to a more aerodynamic shape to prevent excessive heating of her ship's hull. 

Far below her, but coming closer with every moment, a cauldron of seething steam and smoke, lit from below by the red glow of widespread fires, marked the valley that held Sunnydale. Much nearer, a number of aircraft were moving to challenge her, arcing upwards even now, standing on their tails and boosting at a very steep angle to intercept, lashing her ship with what looked to be quite serviceable targeting radar. 

Her power singing within her, Taleene smiled with grim anticipation.

“Kill me,” she whispered, making tiny adjustments to her course as the scan readings flickered at her and the Force murmured urgently in the back of her mind. “Go ahead and _try_ to kill me, I _dare_ you.”

The collision alarms buzzed, and she replied by shoving her throttles all the way forward, hurtling Earthward—and straight into her opponent's teeth--at twelve times the speed of sound.

* * * * *

[Taleene?]

[Not now, Dawn.]

The _Aurora's_ sensors were showing her things that would have had her hiding under a blanket in terror, if she'd had the cybernetic equivalent of one handy. Buffy's ship was ripping through the atmosphere, trailing a roiling wake of glowing, superheated air, diving straight towards the ground (which at those speeds was not far away at _all_ ) and four of those Earth warplanes were climbing straight up and straight _at_ her, on what really-really looked like a course that would smash everyone together in one huge fireball.

[Taleene please please please don't get killed I don't mind if you're crazy I love you anyways and always and if you would just wait for five minutes I've got some attack ships on the way down that can help you fight these--]

[Not _now_ , Dawn!]

Her sensors detected missiles separating from each of the human warcraft and streaking ahead, directly at her sister's ship. All but crying from an overload of fury and fear, Dawn stamped the digital representation of her foot over and over on the digital representation of a floor (that she had to briefly create just for that gesture to make sense) as she shouted (at the maddeningly unadjustable default volume of the comlink):

[Why don't you ever _listen_ to me I'm not a _child_ I'm a—Eeeeeeeeeeeeeek!!!]

She broke off with a scream as the missiles merged with the Fury's sensor return, even as the human planes shrieked in right behind them, and then expanding blooms of wreckage were flying _everywhere_.

* * * * *

At those speeds and distances, it was all over in less than four seconds, and everything that happened passed in a series of flicker-swift flashes:

_\--The Earth craft are accepting her challenge and coming at her head-on; no lack of courage there, just a profound ignorance as to who and what they are facing--_

_Experience and Force precognition warning her of the missiles an instant before they are launched, ingrained reflex and a flicker of thought through the cyberlinked control interface bringing her ECM up to howl across a thousand frequencies in a bid to confuse and distract--_

_NoNoNO! Stupid of her to think that would work; these missiles are too primitive for most of the jamming to even register, and too stupid to pay any attention to what they could detect--_

_The Force, showing her the mistake even as she makes it, her hands and thoughts snapping her ship through maneuvers which shift it only a few score meters in any direction off her base course, but doing it so quickly and unpredictably that the missiles are twisting and rolling frantically, trying to reacquire the Fury before--_

_She was through; threading the ship through the swarm, the missiles flashing past invisibly fast only to shatter and explode as they struck the trailing shockwave created by her passage through the atmosphere, the air like a solid wall under those conditions, all of it ignored as--_

_Targeting reticules flickering across her vision, the ruthlessly-controlled rage of her thoughts and the uncaring, icy light of the shipmind working together as one to bring death to those who dared--_

_A chill, a shudder, a flicker of something almost like panic, as part of her cries out in horror at what she's doing, screaming that the killing of humans is wrongWrongWRONG--_

_Taleene hesitates; incredibly, impossibly, she hesitates for a bare instant, her shocked mind reaching out through the Force as she starts another maneuver, moving to slip her ship through the warplanes instead of destroying them--_

_And they're firing at her; sensors showing the streams of projectiles even as a series of ringing blows hammer at the lightly-armored hull of her ship, somewhere off to her left, warning lights on her console and a flicker of data from the shipmind telling her of minor damage--_

_A scant handful of kilometers between them now, shrinking to nothing in the blink of an eye, barely an instant in which to react--_

_Firing back, acid-green lasers and ghost-pale particle beams lashing out in a reflex deeper than breathing, even as her hate and fury explode in reaction to the Buffy persona nearly killing her yet again--_

_Two of the Earth craft are shredded by her fire, and she's twitching the Fury from side to side to avoid the debris, then cutting her engine thrust to nothing as she flips her ship nose over, a genius pilot managing the impossible as she simultaneously reverses the shield aspect to give her craft some semblance of aerodynamic stability even while blasting through the air backwards at hypersonic speeds, her weapons now facing back along her course, questing for targets--_

_And the two surviving warplanes are past and arcing to either side in magnificent maneuvers of their own as they somehow manage to surf the Fury's shockwave, wings clawing at the air as they try to turn tightly enough to fire on their rapidly-receding enemy--_

_Only to die in flaming fragments as Taleene's lasers find them, their deaths filling her with a savage joy that almost drowns out the shock and sick dismay from her other self, ignored in the moment as the Fury roars towards the ground at more than thirteen times the speed of sound--_

_Shoving the throttles all the way forward, boosting the engines to emergency thrust, blinding glare of blue-white light aimed at the middle of Sunnydale as the ship comes roaring down, backside first, like a high-tech meteor, and she spreads the shields wide, an invisible parasol opening, dreadfully inefficient when dealing with matter instead of energy, but still able to tenuously grip atmosphere, like an invisible parachute that leaks air like a sieve but is fully two hundred meters across, instantly generating immense drag and a monstrous thunderclap that might well be audible for a thousand kilometers--_

_Taleene grunting as she's shoved deeply into her padded seat despite the inertial compensator, vision graying, hands and mind balancing a myriad of control inputs with a virtuoso's skill even as--_

_Even as...._

_Even as the Fury slows rapidly, from hypersonic to supersonic to subsonic speeds in moments, and then, finally, settling into a hover, the engine thrust fading to a faint glow as the ship comes off its tail to assume a more natural attitude... exactly nineteen meters from the ground._

Taleene regarded the town that spread all around her, the shattered remnants of the settlement largely obscured by smoke and dust despite the light of the fires that seemed to be everywhere. Glancing upwards she could only just make out the starry sky through the haze, though her sensors showed her the still-falling wreckage of her opponents clearly enough.

“Yes, I _am_ the best starpilot in the galaxy; tell me _that_ wasn't real,” she told the empty cockpit, even as she shut down the shields and weapons systems, and brought the ship down to a gentle landing in an area that was mostly clear of debris. Pulling off the headset, she slapped the control that cycled the engines down to standby, freed herself from the chair restraints, and smoothly hurled herself to her feet and through the low access hatch in the rear bulkhead. The ship itself was large enough to support a crew of seven for several weeks if they didn't mind crowding or bland food, but she had no need of sleeping quarters or galley now. Hurrying across the common room, she paused at a storage locker only long enough to pull out a respirator and an emergency medkit. Moving to a wide alcove at the rear of the room, she issued mental commands through her cybercomm, pulling on the breathing device as she watched the hatch slide aside and the armored ramp beyond it slowly lower. Descending the ramp, she surveyed the devastation beyond.

Burning ruins stretched off into the night in every direction, thick clouds of smoke and dust born of pulverized earth and rock giving the scene a murky, nightmarish feel. She took a deep breath, her damaged lungs grateful for the filtered and oxygen-enriched air the mask provided.

“I'm not afraid,” she said softly, reaching out once more with her Force senses. Locating the living glow she'd seen earlier, she marveled anew at the crystalline purity of it. “Not of these people, not of this place, and not of _you_ , either.” The point of light in her mind was pulsing with agony and weariness, and she could see that it was weakening; fading from one moment to the next. With a last mental command for her ship to seal and lock itself, she started off into the ruins at a jog, then accelerated into a full run.

* * * * *


End file.
